Menstruation. Your Period. Aunt Flo.
Women’s Trouble. That Time of The Month.
Coming Into Womanhood. The Crimson Wave. The Red Badge of Courage.
Flying Your Colors. The Invasion of the Red Army.
Riding the Cotton Pony. Full Stop.
I have a feeling I may have lost the male demographic already…
For something so little discussed, it has so many names.
Menstruation has long been taboo across many cultures,
with women’s cycles regarded
as everything from inconvenient to unclean.
With the creation and evolution
of various feminine hygiene products
a term which itself frames women as being in need of sanitation,
the big red taboo remains,
only now with brightly colored packaging
and laughably unrealistic advertisements
of blissfully happy menstruating women.
With the introduction of tampons in the 1930s
a new level of freedom was afforded to menstruating women everywhere.
Or so they were told
Underneath the sanitized imagery
of these apparently revolutionary devices
remains the inter-related and oft-neglected question:
Are tampons vegan?
And are they even safe?
Hi it’s Emily from Bite Size Vegan
and welcome to another vegan nugget.
When I started researching for this topic,
I figured it would be a relatively simple video
to throw together.
Twenty plus hours later,
I found myself deep in a US patent document from 1997,
tracing down various horrific tampon safety experiments from the 1980s.
Starting with the obligatory Google search,
I found a lot of people asking about the vegan status of tampons,
but only uncertainty and vague supposition in response.
Certainly they couldn’t be tested on animals.
I mean, how would that even work?
As I dug further into the legal history of tampon regulation and litigation,
I realized that this video needed to encompass more than a simple yes or no.
Today we’ll be looking at three inter-connected aspects of the
tampon issue: women’s health, animal testing, and environmental
impact, though this topic bleeds into many other areas as well...
couldn't help myself...
including important women's rights issues.
We’ll spend a good bit of time on the health aspect
because it lays the groundwork for both the animal testing
and environmental impact aspects,
and is incredibly vital information for women and girls to have.
You can find chapter markers for navigation in the video description.
I will have a list of resources, along with citations to everything I state,
available on the blog post for this video if you want to delve deeper.
This is a rich and complex subject that one could spend a week
every month investigating and still have more to learn.
Moving on…
Feminine hygiene products are marketed as synonymous with feminine health.
But are they, and tampons in particular, really in a woman’s best interest?
When it comes to the health impact of tampons there are three main variables:
the ingredients, the absorbency level, and the bleaching process.
Each of these relates to two main health concerns:
Toxic Shock Syndrome and dioxin exposure.
To address each of these, we need a brief history
of the little cotton rockets.
Things have come a long way since the belted-on cotton rag contraptions of old,
but really, tampons aren’t as new as you may think.
Introduced commercially in Europe in the 1930s,
they didn’t reach wide acceptance in the United States until around 1974,
due to puritanical concerns that they threatened
the integrity of a woman’s virginity.
In 1974, Procter and Gable
released the Rely brand tampon and American women joined
their European counterparts in revolutionizing that time of the month.
Because what woman doesn’t want “an assurance of daintiness [she’s] never known before”
while doubled over in pain as her uterus plays out its personal Armageddon?
As early as 1975, anecdotal evidence arose connecting Toxic Shock Syndrome
to tampon use.
Toxic Shock Syndrome, or TSS, is a rare but potentially fatal medical condition
caused by toxins produced by a bacterium and characterized
by fever, headache, nausea and vomiting, diarrhea, confusion,
low blood pressure, rash, and sometimes seizures, among other symptoms.
Regardless of this disturbing connection to their products, tampon companies
didn’t investigate for five years, and only then when confronted
by the Center for Disease Control and forced to pay damages to affected women.
Finding the companies had literally no information about the effects
of their products on vaginal physiology and microbiology,
the CDC undertook it’s own tests and within 3-4 weeks
had established that TSS was caused by a particular toxin secreted
by a particular bacterial strain known as staphylococcus aureus.
In the summer of 1980, the CDC recommended warnings be issued
with tampons, a regulation which went into formal effect in 1982
and remains today, as well as cautioned women
that if they wanted to avoid the risk of TSS, to stop using tampons.
The CDC report also found that Procter and Gamble’s Rely tampons
carried the highest risk for TSS.
Rely tampons were uniquely composed of carboxymethylcellulose
and compressed beads of polyester
while other companies utilized a blend of cotton and rayon.
“It’s totally different from any other tampon. See Rely is made of two materials.
Each has advantages of its own, but combined, they’re even better.”
Originally tampons were 100% cotton, but in an effort to combat leakage,
companies increased absorbency by introducing blends of synthetic fibers
including polyester, polyacrylate rayon, carboxymehtylcellulose and viscose rayon.
With the rise of TSS cases, all but cotton and rayon were phased out.
While the Food and Drug Administration insists that rayon is safe.
experts like Dr. Philip Tierno, director of microbiology
and diagnostic immunology at New York University Medical Center,
insists that 100% cotton tampons present the lowest risk.
But before you run out to purchase a small cotton plantation
for residence in your nether regions, it’s important to note that cotton
is the dirtiest crop on the planet, occupying only 2.4% of the world’s cropland
but using 16-25% of the world’s pesticides.
Aldicarb, for example, a pesticide commonly used in cotton production,
is so toxic that a single drop absorbed through the skin
can kill an adult human. And let’s not forget Lauren Wasser,
the model who at 24 years old had her right leg amputated
due to Toxic Shock Syndrome contracted from Kotex Natural Balance.
cotton tampons. Though she’s now
she's doing excellent work challenging and redefining beauty standards.
But tampon ingredients aren’t the only factor.
In 1980 two influential studies were published
which indicated that tampon absorbency rating
was a greater risk factor for TSS than tampon ingredients,
with the risk rising with absorbency level.
The FDA sprung into action and four years later proposed the creation
of federal regulations for absorbency standards.
After only another five years of lively back and forth
with industry leaders, the FDA finally released their ruling
for “Ranges of Absorbency Labeling” for menstrual tampons
on October 26th, 1989. Made it in under a decade.
Well done.
While women could now take comfort in the uniformity of tampon absorbency levels,
it was still impossible for them to know exactly what they
were putting in their bodies.
As early as 1982, the FDA was asked to require
ingredient labeling for tampons due to growing customer concerns.
But despite the advice of its own Obstetrics-Gynecology Devices Panel,
it refused to do so. For a product that has such prolonged
and intimate contact with one of the most sensitive and absorbent
part of the body, the nondisclosure of ingredients
is unsettling at best.
Because the FDA classifies tampons as medical devices, companies
are under no obligation to reveal what’s in their tampons.
Which leads us to the second major health concern:
dioxin exposure in relation to the bleaching process
of tampon production.
Dioxins are a group of chemically-related compounds
that are persistent environmental pollutants
which, due to their fat solubility, accumulate and remain in the body
for 7-11 years.
According to the World Health organization, “dioxins are highly toxic
and can cause reproductive and developmental problems,
damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer.”
While the majority of dioxins people come into contact with are through meat, dairy,
fish and shellfish consumption, they are also a byproduct
of the chlorine bleaching process used in the manufacture of paper products,
including the rayon in tampons.
In 1987, an FDA scientist stated that, “It is critical to an adequate risk assessment
that the level of dioxins in tampons, sanitary pads, diapers,
and other medical devices be measured.
The capacity to measure such levels exists within FDA.
Extraction data for dioxin from these products...
would improve the accuracy of any risk assessment.”
Yet the FDA again refused the advice of its own people,
saying there wasn’t adequate data on dioxins to warrant labeling.
Later in 1990, along with the EPA and Consumer Product Safety Commission,
the FDA authored a study of risks related to products containing
chlorine-bleached wood pulp and found the dioxin levels to be negligible.
However, numerous specialists disagreed with their conclusion.
One particularly firm voice was that of House Representative Carolyn B. Maloney,
who introduced a bill on November 7, 1997 proposing an act entitled
“The Tampon Safety and Research Act of 1997.”
The act “provided for research to determine the extent to which
the presence of dioxin, synthetic fibers, and other additives in menstrual
tampons pose any risk to the health of women.”
Sadly, Maloney’s act was not passed. But, ever persistent,
she resubmitted it in 1999,
2003,
2005,
2008,
2011,
2014
and 2015,
now calling it “The Robin Danielson Act,” after a woman who died from TSS in 1998.
An important element of Maloney’s argument remains that the FDA itself
doesn’t monitor dioxin levels, but rather relies on companies
to self-monitor and submit reports.
Because if ever there were someone the honor system was made for,
it’s faceless multi-billion dollar corporations!
The dioxin levels found to be negligible by these organizations are based
on one tampon, negating the accumulation
within the body.
Maloney compares this to basing the health risks of smoking
on one cigarette.
While tampon companies have moved from the original chlorine gas bleaching methods
to either elemental chlorine-free bleaching or totally
chlorine-free bleaching, most manufacturers use the former,
which still produces dioxins.
Now know what you must be thinking. “Okay, okay, I get it!
Tampons are toxic, infection-filled cancer sticks for my naughty bits.
It’s a tamponspiracy!
But what’s that got to do with veganism?” I’m so glad you asked.
Well, with all the aforementioned safety issues,
scientists of course realized that the only way to keep women safe
from the great white threat was to torture and kill mice, rabbits,
chickens, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, monkeys, sheep, goats and baboons.
Because nothing says feminine daintiness like brutal vivisection.
While I’ve always had to dig down several layers to get to the substantial
studies when I’ve researched animal testing for particular products like medication,
cigarettes or what have you, there’s always been some readily
accessible information with which to start. This was not the case with tampons.
Outside of questions and debates on vegan forums and a totally uncited excerpt
posted and reposted on vegan tumblrs, I couldn’t find specific information
on how or even if tampons are tested on animals.
However, much like nature’s gift to women, I’m nothing if not persistent.
I eventually found my way to a document for
US Patent number 5641503 A for additives to tampons,
filed on January 13th, 1995 and published June 24th, 1997, on behalf
of Mcneil-Ppc, Inc, owned by the more widely known Johnson & Johnson.
This document described several experiments,
giving me just enough to search out the original papers as a starting place.
Now I’m not sure the difficulty of finding such studies was purposeful
but it was certainly in the best interest of tampon producers everywhere.
I’ll briefly describe some choice examples
of the very un-vegan side of tampons, but do refer to the blog post
for links to additional and more thorough examples.
And I won’t be showing anything graphic.
The studies were hard enough to find let alone photos.
To start, almost every experiment I encountered,
whether using live animals or not, at least employed the use of rabbits’ blood
and either bovine brain heart agar, which is exactly what it sounds like,
or some sort of beef heart medium, with several also employing
sheep erythrocytes, and one using fetal calf serum.
A rather unique study incubated fertilized hen’s eggs for 11 days and then injected
the live chicken embryos with Toxic Shock Syndrome Toxin One, knows as TSST-1.
The embryos were then “examined for death 24 hours after the injection.”
Rabbit models for tampon safety come in several variations.
Some rabbits received multiple intradermal injections into their backs
of the TSS toxin over a period of 7 weeks at which point “the rabbits were bled.”
One experiment described strapping the rabbits into a rack
for four hours to acclimate them so they’d fight less
when restrained for injection.
Then their “deaths were recorded and surviving rabbits were observed after
four days for gross myocardial and liver necrosis.” Some were also
given endotoxins “to determine their susceptibility to lethal shock.”
Other methods implanted subcutaneous diffusion chambers under the rabbits’ skin
for a steady release of toxins.
One such experiment included that their diffusion chambers were made
of “perforated polyethylene gold balls.”
Yet other rabbits had four diffusion chambers implanted
in their uteruses, releasing toxins directly into their wombs.
The chambers were “recovered at the time of death
or after 14 days when the experiment was terminated,”
at which time all remaining rabbits were killed and dissected.
Some rabbits endured the repeated vaginal insertion of actual tampons
laced with live TSST positive bacteria.
In one such experiment, rabbits had an infected tampon inserted
and left for four hours before having it removed and the process repeated
with a sterile tampon, and then again with a third
that was left in for 14-16 hours to simulate overnight usage.
Menstruation was simulated by injecting a mixture of rabbit blood
and bovine serum albumin into the rabbits’ vaginas
once the tampons were in place.
Perhaps the most bizarre iteration was an experiment where tampons
were inserted subcutaneously into the tissue on the back of the rabbits’ necks.
The forced vaginal insertion of toxin-laced tampons
was also inflicted upon baboons, with one experiment leaving them in
for twelve hours at a time “to allow for additional growth
of staphylococcus aureus and TSST-1 production within the vaginal cavity.”
Guinea pigs also received intravaginal innoculations of the TSS toxin
and other associated strains in an experiment carried out
at a University 15 minutes from where I currently live.
One report used terminology I’ve never before seen in a scientific paper
stating that the rabbits who hadn’t already died
were “sacrificed” for dissection, a term which actually captures
rather simply the main argument for animal testing.
Namely that it’s a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.
I have an entire video series on animal testing delving into
this argument and more, but a summary review
on Toxic Shock Syndrome research from within the scientific community
itself and one that’s in favor of continued experimentation,
says it better than I ever could:
“That S. aureus strains produce a wide number of extracellular products…
which cause severe biologic effects in some animals makes it difficult
to confirm that the symptoms noted in animals given TSST-1 or infected
with TSST-1-producing strains are specific for TSS in humans.”
Basically meaning because these are mice, rabbits, rats, hamsters,
guinea pigs, monkeys, sheep, goats, and baboons, and not humans,
the results can’t be relied upon as indicators of human reactions.
So what was the point?
Well, the report assures that “Nonetheless, most animal model data
relating to the effects of TSST-1 strongly support its role
as the most prominent toxin causing TSS.”
Excellent.
Now we know that the Toxic Shock Syndrome Toxin Number One
is the most prominent cause of Toxic Shock Syndrome.
I’m sure every one of those beings who was injected,
cut into, raped with toxin-laced tampons, and “sacrificed” can rest easy knowing
their invaluable contribution to science was not in vain.
While most of the specific experiments I described were from the eighties
and nineties, with a few in the 2000’s this kind of experimentation
continues today all over the world, right in our own backyards.
Now if what we’ve covered already isn’t reason enough to ditch
the little toxic seeds of vaginal destruction,
let’s briefly look into the environmental impact of our Monthly Visitor
The average woman will throw away 250-300 pounds of menstruation products
including as many as 16,800 tampons in her lifetime.
While both tampons and pads leach chemicals, including dioxins, into the water
and soil, tampons in particular are a major hazard to marine life.
The buoyant applicators can float out for miles and are often eaten
by marine wildlife, becoming lodged in their digestive tracts,
causing them to slowly starve to death.
Some also contain bisphenol A, an endocrine disruptor
proven to have harmful effects on aquatic wildlife.
Used tampons and pads can harbor harmful pathogens and bacteria,
and their decomposition in landfills is unlikely to impossible with a 2005 study
showing tampons to be the slowest to degrade of all paper/cotton products.
I think it’s safe to say, after all of this,
that mainstream tampons are decidedly not vegan
and very, very likely, not safe.
So what’s a girl to do when the Uterine Ninjas arrive?
Well, luckily there are alternatives which I have links to on the blog post.
There are several brands of 100% organic cotton tampons,
which sidesteps the toxic chemicals of conventional cotton
and the questionable affects of rayon, though can still contribute
to pollution even if labeled biodegradable.
The ones I have listed on the blog post have clear no animal testing policies.
An alternative that checks all the boxes is a menstrual cup,
which, believe it or not, even predates the tampon,
with the first known concept arising in 1867.
Though distributed since the 1930’s, menstrual cups have not seen
the same success as tampons, possibly in part because of their lack
of built in obsolescence, meaning most of the companies
are small and independently run.
Options include the Keeper, the Diva Cup, and more.
Additionally, for your pads, as they are composed of the same
questionable materials and toxins, and just as environmentally destructive,
there are reusable cloth options like GladRags and Lunapads,
with organic non-bleached options.
Both the cups and reusable pads have to struggle against societal norms
and menstruation taboos as they require a bit more intimacy with your own anatomy.
But when you think of your health, the needless torture of animals,
and the destruction of the planet and its marine life, getting a little more
acquainted with your private parts seems a small price to pay.
And since cups and cloth last for years, you actually save money!
I hope that this video has been helpful. It’s far longer than I originally envisioned
but in seeing how very little reliable information is out there on this topic,
I really wanted to be thorough.
Menstruation is nothing to be ashamed of or secretive about.
Just like the importance of exposing the animal products industries,
it’s only when we shine a light on what’s hidden that we can know what we
are supporting and choose to make different decisions from here on out.
The time it took to produce this video clocks in at about [62 hours].
If you’d like to help support Bite Size Vegan so I can keep
putting in the long hours to bring you this educational resource,
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You are beyond awesomtastic.
Now I’d love to hear your thoughts on this red-hot report.
Did you know this information about tampons?
What alternatives do you use or think you’d like to try in place
of those treacherous tomes of toxic death? Let me know in the comments!
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up and share it around
to help inform other women and girls. If you’re new, be sure to hit
that big red subscribe button down there for more awesome vegan content
every Monday, Wednesday, and some Fridays.
Now go live vegan, Ride the Crimson Wave
on the Cotton Pony, and I’ll see you soon.
I just discovered something great! It's Rely.
A new tampon from Proctor and Gamble. It's really different and better.
Really a better tampon. Remember they named it Rely.
If you use Rely Tampons here is an important message from Proctor and Gamble.
Women who use Rely Tampons should stop using them and return any unused
product to Proctor and Gamble for a refund.
Proctor and Gamble has suspended the sale of Rely tampons.
This action has been taken until more is known about a new disease
called Toxic Shock Syndrome. Some studies suggest that Rely Tampons
increase the risk more than other tampon brands.
We advise you to stop using Rely tampons.
Remember they named it Rely