Police officer Kirsty Kerr would rather not remember the day she can’t forget: when she wore a black and cream skirt to work.
Kerr, from Glasgow, has endometriosis, a painful disorder of the uterus thought to affect 10% of women worldwide. Since she was 10, her periods have been not only excruciating – she has been hospitalised with severe abdominal pain, twice – but so heavy as to seep through layers of thick sanitary pads, underwear and often clothing.
While wearing that skirt, she leaned over to fetch something for a male colleague. “It wasn’t until afterwards that I saw my seat, realised I had leaked everywhere, and thought: ‘Oh my God, he must have seen that.’”
This was not a one-off. Kerr recalls, wincingly, more situations than she can count “that have just been absolutely humiliating”.
“There were moments when I leaked in class and had to do a kind of shuffle to try and wipe the seat, or I’ve stood up with a big mark and somebody’s seen it.” Yet for up to seven days in every 30, for more than three decades, there has been very little she could do about it. Kerr is not currently an operational officer, in part because of her endometriosis.
“There have been many times I’ve been out on duty that I can’t get to a toilet; in the case of missing-person searches, you can be out for eight, nine, 10 hours with no facilities.
“I was putting big pads up the front, the back, an extra one in the middle. Honestly, some days I would despair and think I might as well just wear a goddamn nappy.”
Then Kerr was given “an absolute godsend” by Carol Smillie, fellow Glaswegian and former host of Changing Rooms, in the form of her Pretty Clever Pants: knickers that conceal a secret waterproof layer.
Period-proof underwear has recently gone from hippyish to being hyped as a sustainable, pragmatic part of menstrual management. Their moisture-wicking fabric captures leaks and protects against stains, but they look and feel the same as everyday underwear. Some – such as the best-selling hip-hugger style made by US company Thinx, which claims to absorb two tampons’ worth of liquid – may even look better.
These are the most absorbent of Thinx’s range: each of its nine styles promise different levels, from half a tampon’s worth of liquid up to two, with customers invited to “build a cycle set”.
“I think they’re pretty effective if you go in with reasonable expectations,” says writer Kelly Dougher, who reviewed Thinx for website xoJane last year. She cannot use tampons, and finds pads and menstrual cups uncomfortable. Period underwear is a useful alternative. “They’re not for everyone, but I really like having a couple of pairs on hand,” she says.
Thinx, Pretty Clever Pants and other period underwear look like nicer-than-average knickers. They feel high-quality and supportive. But no period underwear can replace the need for other protection; they are intended as back up. “We ask people to know their flow,” says Siobhán Lonergan of Thinx. “On your light or medium days, you may not actually have to use backup. Everybody’s period is different.”
Used in tandem with other products, period underwear provides peace of mind. For those with endometriosis or bladder weakness, that can be life-changing. Kerr refers to a time before and after “Carol’s pants”. She owns “loads”, in all the different colours and styles, at about £10 a pair.
“I still leak. I’ll always leak. But the pants are there to stop that going any further.”
The idea of underwear with a waterproof barrier, “completely undetectable as being any different from just normal pretty knickers”, came to Smillie in 2011 when the subject of periods came up while on holiday with her teenage daughters. After 25 years in television she was seeking a new challenge, and she was immediately struck by the possibilities.
“I just thought: ‘It’s so simple, and the potential is massive,’” she says. “I have never been with a buyer who hasn’t totally got it, who hasn’t gone: ‘My God, it’s so obvious, I can’t believe no one’s done this before.’”
In fact, they had. Vancouver-based company Lunapads, which makes reusable pads and “period panties”, says it was the first to market period underwear commercially. Founder Madeleine Shaw, suffering from monthly bladder infections as a result of using tampons, devised washable cloth pads for her personal use in 1993.
The company has sold period underwear since the mid-90s. Today Lunapads says upwards of 2m tampons and pads are diverted from landfills each month as a result of more than 100,000 “progressive, forward-thinking” customers using its products worldwide.
Though Lunapads considers the benefits of reusable menstrual products obvious – less waste, financial savings, fewer health concerns – its products have never quite become mainstream. The press-kit Q&A posits one likely reason: “How do you respond to the ‘ew’ factor?”
Smillie freely admits she underestimated the challenges when she launched her product in 2012 with her friend Annabel Croft, the former British tennis No 1; it was then called Diary Doll and aimed at teenage girls. (Smillie has since bought out Croft’s share.) Sales at Debenhams and John Lewis were slow. It dawned on Smillie that it was no good marketing sanitary products to teenagers when it was their mothers who would be paying for them.
Diary Doll’s Manchester-based manufacturers went into administration in January 2014, prompting a change in direction. After intensive market research, it relaunched with a new name – Pretty Clever Pants – and a new target audience: women over 40 suffering from pelvic floor weakness.
One in three women who have had a baby suffers incontinence, yet it is an “even more taboo area” than menstruation, notes Smillie. But it’s a fast-growing market. A buyer at Boots told her early on that the period market was declining. “I was gobsmacked. They said young girls today will not put up with it the way their mothers did. They go: ‘Well, why would I have that? It’s rubbish.’ They’ll go on the pill, they’ll have an implant, whatever it takes to just get rid of it.”
Since pivoting from periods to incontinence, Smillie believes she is on the cusp of a breakthrough. Pretty Clever Pants are now stocked by Boots and Amazon, and she has just signed a global deal with shopping channel High St TV. Smillie is hopeful its network will catapult Pretty Clever Pants into the mainstream: “They did it with NutriBullet.”
After five years, it is now make or break. “I’ve taken it as far as I possibly could without actually emptying our entire bank account,” she says. “I’m chuffed I’ve got it as far as I have.” Smillie says she underestimated the challenge of building a brand around something that is seen as distasteful, even disgusting, that no one wants to talk about. Thinx has made challenging that taboo a part of its brand. After four years – thanks to an aggressive marketing strategy – the US company is becoming synonymous with period underwear, the way Spanx is with shapewear.
If you are a woman who uses social media, chances are you have already come across its ads. One is an endorsement from an effusive Mila Kunis. Another shows a Gal Gadot-lookalike playing ping-pong with a blood bag hooked into her underwear, to demonstrate (sort of), the product’s absorbency.
It is a far cry from blue liquid being cleanly absorbed by pillowy sanitary pads on primetime television. In 2015, Thinx was handed an easy win when the company that oversees advertising on the New York City public transit system expressed reservations about its “suggestive” posters, which cheekily alluded to the female reproductive system with egg whites and grapefruit-halves. This reaction prompted indignation on social media and the Metropolitan Transit Authority went on to approve the posters (after protesting that it had never intended to reject them).
Lonergan, Thinx’s vice-president of branding since March, says it was the “first battle of many” for the “disruptive” and “provocative” company. “By not using images of butterflies and flowers, not talking in conventional language, we actually asked people to sit up and notice us.”
Besides, a little online controversy might appeal to the typical Thinx customer, as described by Lonergan: an opinionated woman aged 25 to 32, an influencer within her peer group, interested in beauty, tech and feminism and “probably quite vocal from a social media perspective”.
Kim Rosas and Amanda Hearn, self-described “menstrual education” bloggers at website Put a Cup In It, say Thinx’s “intense” marketing has made all period underwear more pervasive. “Thinx marketing dollars have done a lot for reducing the stigma around reusable menstrual products of all types.”
But the whole concept may not be truly revolutionary. Sharra Vostral, an associate professor at Purdue University in Indiana and an expert in menstrual-hygiene technology, likens period underwear to the “horrible rubber bloomers and aprons” worn by women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Material technology has come a long way, but the idea of trying to contain menstrual fluid with a physical barrier is not new,” she says. The signifiers may have changed, from butterflies to grapefruit but the stigma remains the same.
Vostral is sceptical of any talk of taboo-breaking from manufacturers of menstrual products which, by design, enable women to pass fluids undetected. This is not achieved without effort, and the fact that women put that effort in, month after month, is testament to the social imperative to conceal menstrual blood as something shameful.
If that’s the taboo Thinx aims to break, Vostral says their pants are a blunt tool: “There’s more we need to do to accept that periods are not bad or wrong”. Being truly comfortable with your body’s natural rhythms and output, she says, looks like poet Rupi Kaur’s self-portrait showing her pyjamas stained with menstrual blood (this was removed from Instagram for violating the platform’s terms of service), or the woman who ran the London Marathon without a tampon.
But she accepts the need for a pragmatic middle ground, particularly given the constraints of the eight-hour working day (another construction, she points out): “Our bodies don’t necessarily conform to the dictates of an industrial society.”
And though period underwear may not entirely eliminate the need for disposable products, Vostral – who is about to publish a book on toxic shock syndrome, a potentially fatal bacterial infection commonly linked to tampon use – says that reducing that need is a step in the right direction.
For all the setbacks Smillie has encountered, customer feedback has made her more convinced than ever of the need for her product. “‘I wish these were around when I was a girl’ is a very common one,” she says. “So is ‘lifechanging’.”
