Study reveals period products aren’t as absorbent as advertised

For the first time ever, researchers have tested the absorption of pads and tampons using actual human blood instead of water or saline solution. As it turns out, many of them are mislabelled according to their capacity for preventing leaks.

It’s inherently clear that women find it much harder than men to have their bodies understood within the medical sphere.

Continually dismissed by male and female physicians (I speak from personal experience), the gender health gap is a prevalent issue that sees us taken less seriously by professionals, particularly in the field of female-specific illnesses such as endometriosis, perimenopause, or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

But did you know that this negligence also applies to our time of the month? Despite affecting around 800 million individuals every day, periods remain grossly under-researched.

This was most recently made apparent by Stanford University, which reported that a search for ‘menstrual blood’ on the PubMed database brought up a mere 400 results from the last few decades, while a search for ‘erectile dysfunction’ had approximately 10,000.