"The menstrual business is booming!"
This is how Meagan Brockway puts it over the phone. She heads up customer service and account management at GladRags, a Portland, Oregon–based company that sells sustainable feminine hygiene products.
"With the internet, everybody’s more connected than ever," she continues, "and there’s potential for a wildfire of discussion about menstrual cups and cloth pads."
That’s right, we’re no longer living in a tampons-or-disposable-pads-only world. In fact, if you wanted to borrow some familiar phrasing, you could say that period care alternatives have reached heavy flow.
First, let’s dispense with some vocabulary: A menstrual cup is an upside-down bell-shaped device made of a nontoxic material like medical-grade silicone and used to collect period blood. It can be reusable for several years, though disposable versions are also available. They’re most often inserted into the vaginal canal like a tampon, but some brands, like Softcup, are worn higher up, around the cervix.
Cups can be worn for up to 12 hours, and users find they need to empty them far less often than they need to change tampons or pads. They typically cost between $20 and $40. Cloth pads are exactly what they sound like; you wash and reuse them. In the United States, both of these products are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s the menstrual cup, however, that’s really stealing the show.
In November of last year, a Kickstarter launched by Intimina, a Swedish brand specializing in products for women’s health, outdid its modest target goal of $7,800 by some 4,000 percent. The money was being raised to produce a compact, collapsible, bright pink menstrual cup, and in the end, more than 8,000 people donated a total $325,000 to the cause. This put Intimina’s "Lily Cup" project in the top 2 percent of Kickstarters.
Elsewhere in the menstrual cup realm, the Diva Cup reports that its sales are growing by double digits in both the U.S. and Canada, and that they have been for the last 12 years. Other brands like Softcup also boast of impressive growth; there are a couple dozen players in the scene, from early pioneer The Keeper to Finnish favorite Lunette.
This may all seem like small potatoes, even (or perhaps, especially) within the $2 billion feminine hygiene market. But these figures are significant given that issues of menstruation seem unlikely to attract millions in venture capital money. Tech bros aren’t pitching "Uber, but for periods," and behemoths like Apple are still having trouble mastering the fundamentals.
Brockway’s path to discovering the menstrual cup seems to mirror many women’s: She used tampons for years before a friend turned her on to the cup. "I just didn’t know there was another option," she says. "I always thought tampons were so scratchy. The string just hanging down so you can get pee all over it, it was horrible. I hated it. I just thought it was disgusting—pulling it out when it was dry was just the worst feeling. I cringe if I think of it." She’s been using cups for about seven years, and has even come around to cloth pads: "I like to say it’s like wearing a pair of sweatpants."
Pads, then referred to as sanitary towels, from the early 1900s. Photo: Getty Images
Kaitlin Ball, the brand director of Softcup, says the company conducted a survey among its Facebook fans and found that many of them came across Softcup when searching for alternatives to pads and tampons. "More and more there’s this sense of dissatisfaction with this current method," Ball says. "Who loves tampons at the end of the day? They’re not the most comfortable things."
Amandine Pranlas-Descours, the global brand manager for Intimina, says she saw a similar trend among her customers: "Women are definitely not satisfied with current menstrual products and are really looking for solutions." A survey found that over 70 percent of the donors to Intimina’s Kickstarter had never used cups before.
Still, getting women to try a new product can be difficult. "What I never realized before starting to work for Softcup is that feminine hygiene buying is a very ingrained behavior," explains Ball. "Most women use what their mothers taught them to use. There’s not a ton of products out there that that can be said of."
"Feminine hygiene buying is a very ingrained behavior. Most women use what their mothers taught them to use."
Lara Freidenfelds, a historian and author of The Modern Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America, adds, "You can understand why women don’t just decide to abandon what is working for them and try something new. It makes it hard for new products to find a place, especially if they’re very different."
Though both have been used for thousands of years, Freidenfelds points out that sanitary napkins and tampons only began to be mass-marketed in the first half of the 20th century, "the era when we were starting to have disposable culture." Disposable pads, starting in 1921, caught on quickly, but tampons, introduced to the market in 1936, took a few decades to gain traction. Similarly, the cup has been around since 1867, and in its modern form since the 1980s, but has yet to go mainstream.
For her book, Freidenfelds interviewed women about their attitudes toward periods. "What I found that people wanted was not necessarily lots and lots of discussion of menstruation in public," she notes. "In fact, sometimes that undermines women’s interest in having it more or less go away and be a nonissue. But I found that they did want to have control of the conversation. They wanted to be able to choose when to talk about it and when to have it be hidden, or not acknowledge it if they didn’t want to. Very few women told me they wanted to have a moon day and stay home and think about their bodies all day."
The challenge of mainstreaming alternative hygiene products speaks to the uncomfortable truths of our society’s attitude toward menstruation. "For some women, it’s just easier for them to rip off a disposable and throw it away, and not ever have to think about the ramifications of disposable products," Brockway posits. "With things like pads and tampons, you’re often free to minimize the contact you have with your own body, but with something like a menstrual cup, you’re very aware because you’re having to insert it with your fingers. It makes you more aware of your own anatomy. I think that’s always a good thing, to be aware of what’s going on down there."
The fear and shame around periods is an issue that has received a lot of attention in the international development community as of late. Celeste Mergens is the founder and executive director of Days for Girls, a nonprofit that distributes kits of reusable pads to girls and women in the developing world, who, in addition to experiencing other struggles related to poverty, don’t have reliable access to feminine hygiene products.
Mergens draws a direct line from the stigma surrounding periods to women’s second-class status. "I believe this is one of the keys to why women end up in roles with less leadership options, how we end up having less opportunity around the globe, and how so often violence is perpetrated against women," she says. "There’s a failure to take this head on and say, ‘Hey everyone, menstruation is all of us.’ Even here in the U.S., we would rather talk about diarrhea than menstruation."
It’s for this reason that alternative menstrual products are considered revolutionary; they force you to acknowledge your period in a very immediate way. "It’s hard to get used to inserting a menstrual cup and finding out the best way to do it for you, what works best for your body," Brockway says of her early trials with the cup. "But I got over that learning curve and it worked flawlessly."
Funding for the collapsible Lily Cup was raised via Kickstarter. Photo: Intimina
Others get over it, too. "Softcups certainly require a certain level of comfort and knowledge about your body," Ball says. "It is digital insertion. She is using her fingers to push Softcup in fairly high. I talk to a lot of moms and coaches through our outreach, and they say that the girls simply get past that. For swimmers, basketball players, there is always that horror around game time when you’re on your period."
However, the cup does tend to skew older. The Diva Cup targets women ages 18 to 35, according to Sophie Zivku, the company’s communications and education manager; women in their twenties were the biggest segment of donors to the Lily Cup Kickstarter. Pranlas-Descours started a collection of some of her favorite comments from these customers once they received the finished product: "This has changed my whole life," one woman wrote. "I can’t get over how amazing this product is," wrote another.
Fans of alternative feminine hygiene products are quick to extol menstrual cups' many benefits. Not only are they better for the environment because they create less waste, they’re also cheaper, potentially saving a women thousands of dollars over her lifetime. Others simply find them more convenient and comfortable. Those who use Softcups, which sit higher up in the vagina, even praise the ability to have sex while the cup is inserted.
"Right now, you know more about what’s in your sweater than you do what's in your tampons."
With regards to health, there’s been recent chatter about whether the materials used in disposable pads and tampons are as safe as they should be. Last May, Rep. Carolyn Maloney called for further study of the chemicals contained in menstrual hygiene products; her bill was not successful.
"Right now, you know more about what’s in your sweater than you do what's in your tampons," points out Sharra Vostral, a professor at Purdue University and the author of Under Wraps: A History of Menstrual Hygiene Technology. "Legislation just to say what is in this stuff has still not been passed. Even simple legislation requiring manufacturers to say, ‘Here is the ingredient list’ would help a lot in understanding what we are putting in our bodies."
"There’s huge work to be done in the menstruation world," echoes Rachel Horn. Horn, 25, is currently on a three-month cross-country bike trip for Sustainable Cycles, raising awareness about menstrual alternatives. "I actually find it quite unjust, the lack of research that goes on. I feel like women are Guinea pigs." She would like to see more education and more product options. "I am unhappy with the choices that conventional America sees in the grocery store. This is the point of the project: People do not know about cups and cloth pads. They just know what they’re taught in elementary and middle school when they first get their periods, and the pad and tampon companies show ’em a video and give ’em a little packet."
Photo: Getty Images
Though there hasn’t been much formal study, doctors generally agree that menstrual cups are safe to use. (There are, however, the occasional "my cup got stuck" horror stories.) Tampons are also thought of as safe these days, but still, menstrual cups have never been linked to Toxic Shock Syndrome, unlike tampons. "It’s always going to boil down to the woman’s preference," explains Mireille Truong, a gynecologist with Columbia University Medical Center. "Not one single option is the best for everyone."
If Horn had it her way, women would reclaim the period. "We often open our workshops with an icebreaker: Are you on your period right now or not, and what are you using?" she says. "I’m not in the workshop to push my ‘hippie viewpoints.’ I’m literally there to say, ‘Hey, what’s up? I bleed, you bleed. Awesome, let’s support each other. Let’s be educated people together.’"
Sarah Wilson, 27, is on another leg of the Sustainable Cycles bike trip. Six women started out on the West Coast at the beginning of March and are making their way toward the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research Conference in Boston in June. "I fantasize about us going into schools and talking to school-age girls about periods because it’s such an issue of shame," Wilson says. "You’re looking at a diagram on a projector that has no real connection to your body and what’s happening. It’s so disconnected. It’s such an intimate subject, but somehow they find a way to make it seem much more disconnected from your own physical being, which is insane."
The next push for menstrual cup brands is to increase their products’ accessibility. The Diva Cup has an 85 percent penetration rate in drug stores in its native Canada, but here in the U.S., where the market is much bigger, it’s still fighting for placement in pharmacies and grocery stores, according to Zivku. Oftentimes stores are put off by the lack of future purchase opportunity: "When a store first learns about it and that the consumers are going to buy one a year, all they hear is that the customer is going to come once to your store," she says. There’s also what she calls "the ick factor": "It comes down to personal bias. They’ll find it different, uncomfortable."
Brockway agrees that there’s still a ways to go when it comes to acceptance. "If there are more voices requesting alternatives to what they’re being given, then maybe these stores will begin to think, ‘Well, if the people want it, the people get it,’" she says. "We’re certainly not everywhere we would like to be."
Distribution is important, as per Ball, because "we want to be an option that’s as easy as buying a tampon or a pad." This could be another problem the internet solves. "Maybe once we start ordering everything online anyway, it doesn’t matter whether your local CVS has it," says Freidenfelds. "People will be able to access stuff that’s a little more alternative."
Zivku believes pads and tampons maybe one day even become obsolete: "We can definitely identify a number of consumer products that have faded out. We used to have Walkmen, CD players. Now people don't even have iPods—it’s all on their phones, everything’s on one device. I would argue that we’re probably seeing a similar shift within feminine hygiene; 50, 100 years from now, who knows?"
Wilson agrees. "Lunette has a really good slogan," she says. "‘Grandma didn't use tampons, your granddaughter won’t either.’ It’s like a blip in history."