the case of the stolen underwear.
replacing my period underwear, one pair at a time.
Disclosure: It’s been a long time since I wrote a shopping-centric post. As you might imagine, these kinds of posts give me feelings about consumerism, capitalism, consumption, and my role in it! Still, I’m a person who sometimes has needs and who sometimes buys things and I try my best to also be a person who shops mindfully when I do. So, here we are. Where applicable or possible, I use affiliate links because that’s a small way I can generate additional income from my work in this place. I don’t include affiliate links for brands that I don’t think are worthy of your dollars and I don’t exclude brands that I do think are worthy of your dollars just because they don’t have an affiliate program. If you are a never-shop type of person and would prefer to cut up old towels to make your own reusable pads, I fully support that decision. If you’d like, scroll to the end to find non-shopping action items!
Last week, days after sharing the details of my great underwear drawer clean out and waxing poetic about how tidiness can maybe help curb consumerism, I got a call from the laundromat saying that five pairs of my period underwear and two silk camisoles had been stolen. I typically wash these things by hand and hang them to dry on my own line, but in balancing the extra summer parenting load, I’d decided to drop them off with the rest of the family’s wash. All of this is to explain how I now find myself in the very ironic position of being in need of new underwear directly on the heels of writing an anti-consumerist screed…about my underwear drawer.
I’m choosing to believe that the person who took my unmentionables was in urgent need of ultra-absorbent menstrual-blood-ready underwear. Goodness knows period poverty is real and period underwear aren’t cheap.
I bought my first pair nine years ago, a year after giving birth to my first kid and a few months into dealing with a whole new kind of period. TMI? Do not read on!
Postpartum, my menstrual flow was much heavier than it had ever been before and I was experiencing leaks for the first time since my early teenage years. After trial and error, I eventually found that a combination of period underwear and a menstrual cup would typically do the best job of keeping me comfortable and protected from midday laundry disasters.
My first pair of period underwear were made by Thinx, the brand that was then known for its anatomically suggestive subway ads and later known for a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit alleged that the brand’s advertising campaign had led consumers to think they were making “a safe, healthy and sustainable choice” when in reality their underwear contained “harmful chemicals...which are a safety hazard to the female body and the environment.” The chemicals in questions are PFAS, also known as forever chemicals. Used in everything from non-stick pans to waterproof clothing, these widespread chemicals are hazardous even in very low quantities and they don’t go away. A product designed to hang out in extremely close proximity to vulvas and vaginas, should absolutely not contain them and also their widespread, unregulated use means that they now show up just about everywhere: in our waterways, our bloodstreams, our breastmilk. They’re hard to avoid, in other words, but some folks making period underwear are doing a better job of keeping them at bay and testing for them than others.
After my underwear were taken, I put out a call on Instagram to see what brands of underwear folks were having good luck with lately, and the response was robust. I’ve waded through the recommendations and have compiled my favorites, including what I’ve landed on trying for myself.