Where to buy pads

Night pads are generally thicker and longer. The extra length offers greater absorbency for the hours that you're asleep and helps to keep you covered, regardless of your sleeping position.

If you prefer to use tampons, using an overnight pad or super pad for when you go to bed is a good idea. Ideally, you shouldn't leave a tampon in for longer than eight hours, as that increases the risk of Toxic Shock Syndrome TSS. Maternity pads are extra thick, perfect for new mums. Some products even add Aloe-Vera for soothing.

During our research, we noticed that there are varying levels of thickness among liners. Some products are wafer thin, providing very little to nothing in terms of absorbency. These types of liners will do the job if you're just looking for everyday freshness, but we haven't tested them as they aren't comparable to the rest.

You're likely to use a mixture of liners, regular and super and maybe night pads throughout the different stages of your period. Once you're familiar with your period and its different stages, you'll know when to use certain products for the best protection. Period underwear are a relatively new addition to the market but offer an alternative for environmentally concious consumers. They have a moisture-wicking layer over an absorbent layer in the gusset, protected by a leak-resistant layer, and most importantly are washable and re-useable and some claim to be re-useable for a couple of years.

We've previously trialled period underwear as well as menstrual cups and have recently included period underwear from Modibodi in our comparative testing to see how they stack up against pads. Check our review for the results. Most American women will menstruate for about 40 years in total, bleeding for about five days a month, or about 2, days over the course of a lifetime—about six and a half years, all told.

All that menstrual fluid has to go somewhere. In the U. The most common menstrual products are a veritable cornucopia of plastic. Tampons come wrapped in plastic, encased in plastic applicators, with plastic strings dangling from one end, and many even include a thin layer of plastic in the absorbent part. Pads generally incorporate even more plastic, from the leak-proof base to the synthetics that soak up fluid to the packaging.

For Ann Borowski , who researched the ecological impact of sanitary products, the sheer numbers were astounding. I don't want to have that kind of burden on the planet. The blood itself was considered unhealthy—even poisonous. That general attitude persisted for centuries. By the mids in the U. But menstruation was an unavoidable reality that had to be dealt with.

Women in the pre th century U. That meant leftover scraps of fabric, soft strips of bark, or whatever else was available and absorbent. But the tools left much to be desired. They were often bulky and unwieldy, and they had to be washed and dried—which meant they would be displayed publicly, a less-than-desirable situation in a culture that stigmatized menstruation.

In , the first pack of Kotex crossed a drugstore counter. Thus began a new era: that of the disposable menstrual product. Kotex were made with Cellucotton, a hyper-absorbent plant-based material that had been developed during World War I for use as medical bandaging. Nurses started to repurpose the material for menstrual pads, and the practice stuck. Some physically active menstruators, like dancers and athletes, gravitated toward another emerging product: tampons.

The tampons of the s were not too different than the ones on drugstore shelves today, generally made of a wad of dense cotton or a paper-like material attached to a string. What all of the new products had in common was disposability.

Disposables also meant that menstruators would have to stock up each month, locking them in to decades of purchases. The appeal and ubiquity of disposables grew as more women entered the workforce. You can't let your body slow you down, is the message. The outcome was a massive shift in the market.

By the s, chemists were busily developing sophisticated plastics and other synthetics. The technologies leapt forward so quickly that manufacturers found themselves searching for new markets into which they could incorporate their new materials. Advances in sticky-stuff technology bolstered the use of flexible plastics, allowing the pads to be attached to underwear directly rather than hanging off a complicated, bulky belt system.

And designers found ways to weave thin polyester fibers into the squishy part of the pad to wick fluid away into the absorbent cores , which were getting thinner as superabsorbent materials grew more sophisticated. All these product developments sound incremental, says Lara Freidenfelds , a historian who interviewed dozens of women about their experiences with menstruation for her book The Modern Period, but they add up to big changes in experience. In the early part of the 20 th century many doctors, as well as members of the public, were squeamish about the idea that women—especially young women—might come into contact with their genitals during tampon insertion, says Elizabeth Arveda Kissling , a gender studies expert at Eastern Washington University and author of Capitalizing on the Curse: The Business of Menstruation.

The first recorded U. Others suggested stainless steel or even glass. By the s, plastics could be molded into smooth, thin, flexible rounded shapes—perfect, some designers thought, for tampon applicators. A thin layer often helps hold the tightly-packed cotton part together. In some cases, the string is made of polyester or polypropylene. By the middle of the century, the major players in the U. The core products on shelves are, all too often, depressingly familiar — disposable pads and tampons — even if they may sometimes now be made of organic cotton or have some other mild design tweaks.

The most notable change to the available product mix is probably period pants — which have recently started to appear on mainstream shop shelves and seem to be selling well in markets like the U. Which is not at all new — but has finally got traction beyond its original very niche community of users, which is another signal that consumers are more open to trying different solutions to deal with their monthly bleeding versus the same old throwaway wadding.

While free bleeding — an old movement which has also seen a bit of wider pickup in recent years — can also be seen, at least in part, as a protest against the poor quality of mainstream products for periods.

All of which makes this forthcoming product launch rather interesting: Meet LastPad , a reusable rather than disposable sanitary towel. Image Credits: LastPad. So each LastPad comes with its own fabric pouch in a range of colors for folding up and storing after use and until you get a chance to pop it in the wash. In total, LastObject has sold around 1. But LastPad marks its first push into a really female-focused product category.

A reusable washable sanitary pad is clearly a big step up on the design challenge front versus making reusable silicone Q-Tips or cotton tissues or makeup rounds — because of the complexity involved with designing a wearable, intimate hygiene product that can handle the variable and often messy nature of periods, and keep doing so, use after use. So I think the demand is bigger than I actually imagined.

Because this is also the first product that is only for women. And also because we wanted it to be really innovative. Each LastPad is made up of three layers: A woven top to help keep the pad feeling dry against the skin by quickly funnelling menstrual fluids down into — layer two — a central absorbent section made of bamboo — which sits above a TPU base to ensure no risk of leaks.