Tampon Advice from Healthy Bitch Daily
We didn’t have to google too far to find some answers to our burning tampon questions: Our friends at Healthy Bitch Daily were already on it. Some scary highlights from their post:
To our utter dismay, there are no federal regulations concerning listing ingredients in tampons. So, for those approximately 11,000 tampons you’ll use in your lifetime, you are actually slipping chlorine-bleached rayon or rayon-cotton blends into your body.
In fact, the USDA reports that U.S. cotton farmers dump approximately 55 million pounds of pesticides into the cotton fields.
Yikes. But if you’re not ready to make the jump to the keeper—um, we don’t blame you—HBD recommends some good alternatives, including the Seventh Generation tampons we posted about a few days ago.
I stumbled across your website today and I am really enjoying your resources! The issues you are talking about have become increasingly important to me, and I am trying to make some of these changes in my life.
I had to comment on this post to say, don’t knock the menstrual cup till you’ve tried it! I have been using the Diva Cup for over two years now and I LOVE it! After the first month of adjustment, it is so simple to use. It doesn’t leave me dry like tampons do. Best of all, I save $$ every month and keep extra feminine products out of landfills!
Ditto to what Laura said….it’s not AS MUCH of an adjustment to actually make the change to a menstrual cup as it seems it would be just “thinking” about making the change. Imagine a day when you cant actually FORGET that you even have your period. It’s pure bliss! The fact that women are disgusted at the thought of handling our own fluids is just mirroring this whole “dirty,” “Kill the bacteria!” craze that we’re in. Save the planet AND your body.
I’m not disgusted by it all all (speaking for myself only, of course), but I can’t get the hang of it! The first day for about an hour it seemed to work perfectly. After that, I raced to the ladies’ just in time to catch a whole bunch of fluid that the cup didn’t catch. No, it wasn’t anywhere near full, it just wasn’t positioned correctly. I never did get the hang of positioning it correctly.
Maybe a post on tips? Send me to a blog that already has them?
@philosophotarian Neither of us have used it but we’re both going to try, so as soon as we have we will share. In the meantime we encourage the readers who have tried it to share tips. Maybe I’ll make a separate post to ask people to share.
Philosophotarian – I’ve been using the Diva Cup on and off (alternating with cloth pads from Lunapads.com, depending on what I feel like using on a given day) for over a year now. The best tip I can give you to prevent leaks with a cup is to make sure that it is actually open! The Diva Cup instructions say to rotate it once you’ve inserted it to pop it open, but I could never get that to work. Instead what I do is stick a finger up beside it as far as I can get it, then run my finger all around the outside of the cup to pull it open if it’s still folded over. If you’re still leaking, then you might want to try a bigger cup. Diva Cup comes in 2 sizes, but I’m not sure about others. And if anyone reading is having trouble actually getting it in, what worked for me the first time was to squat in the bathtub with my legs wide open. Once I got it in the first time, it got easier. Hope that helps someone! :)
See the string is a different colour? That is usually coloured using nickel-based dyes, which very often causes skin reactions. WHY would manufacturers do that? It’s certainly worth spending a bit of time talking about these things and figuring out the best alternatives.