When Will I Start to Look Pregnant?

I’m curious if there’s any data on when women start “looking pregnant,” or showing, and why someone might show sooner than another person (weight? multiple pregnancies?).

—Want to Look Pregnant

I so badly wanted there to be good data on this. Some kind of study where they took pictures of people and asked other people to rank whether they looked pregnant and then related that to number of weeks of pregnancy. Writing that out, of course, it actually sounds creepy and borderline body-shaming. So perhaps it’s not a good idea.

While we do not have this comprehensive data, here’s a little guidance. During the first trimester of pregnancy, your uterus grows to the size of a grapefruit but is completely contained in your pelvis. During this period, you will not generally be “showing,” although many women experience a lot of bloating as your digestion slows down. So you may feel like you look pregnant, especially at the end of the day.

In the second trimester, the uterus moves up as it grows and at this point will start to push out the abdominal wall. This is when you truly start to show. For most women, a pregnancy will start to show sometime between 12 and 16 weeks. In terms of what makes you show earlier or later, there are a few things:

Weight and height — women who are thinner and shorter tend to show earlier.
Abdominal muscle — women with weaker abdominal muscles (for example, those who have had abdominal separation in a prior pregnancy) are likely to show earlier.
Prior pregnancy — as a result of prior stretching of the abdominal muscles, later pregnancies show sooner.

The other consideration: your clothes. For most people, through 20 weeks of pregnancy (or farther!), it is possible to dress to hide a pregnancy. Eventually, this will not be the case.