People say their tampons and pads have been funk , but there might be something else run on .
By now, you’re probably familiar with the sneaky practice ofshrinkflation, when products get smaller but the price stays the same. It’s even gotten to the point that President Biden has called on Congress to passa billto stop shrinkflation once and for all.
Too many corporations raise their prices to pad their profits – consign you more and more for less and less . President Biden is calling on Congress to pass a bill ending shrinkflation.pic.twitter.com/sLoBNhD328
Well, now people online are saying their pads and tampons have been getting smaller. And unlike shrinking snack foods, if our period products get smaller without warning, it can make us think something is going on with our health.
A variety of aesculapian conditionscan cause a grave flow , ranging from hormonal imbalances to Cancer the Crab . So it makes sense that multitude might get interested and try medical attention when they suddenly get going going through period products faster than common .
Recently, Melissa Simonsen, 39, has been going viral on TikTok for calling out period product shrinkflation. In a video that’s been viewed over 2.1 million times, she says, “I’m calling you out, Tampax. These sizes that you normalized so that we all, as women, know about which ones we use for about which period of time during our periods. These are not accurate anymore because you shrunk them.”
Melissa told BuzzFeed that she thought something was wrong when her period seemed to get heavier. She explained, “I started suspecting that something was amiss toward the end of last year. I was pregnant at the beginning of the year and unfortunately experienced a miscarriage, so for several months at the start of 2023, I hadn’t seen or used tampons.”
When her period started again , Melissa still had tampons leave alone over from an early bulk leverage . However , after she replenish her period supply , she notice that she was run through them much more quickly than she used to .
She said , " My initial thought ( similar to so many in my comment section ) was that MY body had changed after my miscarriage . That possibly there could even be something worry about an gain in flow at my eld , and I started worrying about early menopause and worry whether we ’d be able to get meaning again if we tried . "
Then she looked at one of her old tampons side by side with one of the new ones, and it all fell into place. She told BuzzFeed, “When I saw those two tampons side by side, I finally put together why R [regular] size had been so useless and why I had been using U [ultra} size when I never have even used that size before!”
She went on to say, “These companies are there to sell a product and make money, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But shrinkflation and skimpflation with no transparency or even acknowledgment from the companies about changing size makes people question themselves and their bodies, even thinking they’re going crazy, doubting their own memories and experiences! It’s not right.”
People also called out pads getting smaller and less sticky:
And some chimed in, annoyed that their usual box of period products contains fewer tampons than it used to, another common shrinkflation tactic:
Some commenters shared that they’ve seen doctors because they were concerned about what appeared to be a heavier flow. Some said they’d changed their birth control prescriptions, and one commenter mentioned having an IUD placed due to the bleeding (which, in case you don’t know, can beextremely painful).
And others shouted out their favorite reusable period products:
People aren’t just talking about changes to period products on TikTok. On Reddit, one userposted this photoof two regular-sized tampons manufactured a year apart, in which the newer one appears to be slightly smaller:
Another usersharedthat their usual tampons now come with four fewer items in each box, writing, “Tampons from two years ago vs. now.”
Another Reddit user shared this photo of two pads, writing, “New vs old Always maxi pad design. The opaque part is the part that actually soaks stuff up.”
After seeing all these claims about changes to period products, I reached out to Procter & Gamble, the parent company behind the popular Tampax and Always brands to find out if they’ve made changes to their products. A spokesperson for P&G told BuzzFeed, “No, we have not changed the sizes for Always and Tampax. Our pads are available in multiple absorbencies designed to fit different needs, body types, and flows.”
It’s reassuring to know that tampon absorbency is dictated by the FDA, so companies can’t go shrinking tampons willy-nilly. But if period products haven’t shrunk, why are so many people saying that they’re going through more tampons than they used to? It’s possible that some of these people may actually be experiencing a heavier flow. If you notice changes in your period, especially if they’re accompanied byother symptomslike pain, fatigue, or blood clots the size of a quarter or larger, it’s a good idea to make an appointment with your gyno.
It ’s also potential that hoi polloi noticing changes in their time period intersection are compare somewhat different merchandise from the same maker . With so many choice on store shelves , it ’s easy to take hold of the untimely box . As someone who gets a moment absentminded at the foodstuff storage , I ’ve done this more times than I care to admit .
But there’s another factor that can’t be ignored. Traditionally, we haven’t tested tampon absorbency with real blood, so the absorbency data we’ve come to rely on doesn’t accurately reflect how well a tampon works in real-world conditions.
According to the study authors, this was the first known time tampon absorbency was tested with actual blood. The fact that tampons wereinventedin 1929 and it took until 2023 for researchers to test them with actual blood says a lot about how period stigma has hurt our understanding of women’s health. Hopefully, this study is a step toward period products that better reflect how much blood we lose each month.
And in the meantime , for anyone interested in studying their own bicycle , it seems like using a menstrual loving cup or disc would be the most straightforward way to evaluate their flow .
