The Bloody Menstrual Cup - a Review

***TMI WARNING: This post is about menstruation products and personal details.  If you are triggered by talk of periods or blood or girl parts, or you don't want to know me that well because you'll see me in real life and need to make eye contact, then skip this post. ***

I'm a pseudo-hippie at heart, and I'm down with Greta; I want to reduce my carbon footprint where I can, and leave this world slightly less awful for Little L.  So, when Candace Cameron-Bure (star of my guilty pleasures Full House, and Fuller House) did a video extolling the praises of menstrual cups, I decided that if Candace can, I can too!  Of course, I had already blocked out the traumatic menstrual cup experiences I had the previous year, because memories are fickle like that.  I reasoned that I just had to find the right fit for me.

So I took an online quiz, because that's how you know what your wizarding name will be, and also how you determine which silicone cup to shove into your nethers.  When the results came in, I online shopped for the one with the best reviews.

Well, I've had a chance to give it the ol' college try, and if menstrual cups are my future, then let the planet burn.  Just kidding; I love you Earth!!  Please stop burning up Australia. :(

But you get my drift, right?

I know that menstrual cups take time to get "right," to find the proper fit, to learn how to insert and extract.  I know that they're better for the environment, extra awesome for developing nations that don't give girls proper support for their periods, and way cheaper than buying pads and tampons and Thinx all the time.  So yes, of course I wanted them to be an awesome fit for me.

But despite what those FB ads tell you, and what your hippie friends tell you, and what Candace Cameron-Bure tells you - it's not right for everyone.

Because:

1) Time
If you have zero commitments and zero work and exactly zero small children, you can absolutely try menstrual cups.  You can take your sweet time on the toilet, in the shower, squatting or standing or doing whatever it takes to get the dang thing in and out.  If it takes 10 minutes, or an hour, or 5 minutes and then a 10 minute break and then another 5 minutes, ... no sweat! You've got all the livelong day.

But if peeing alone is an actual accomplishment you want to tweet about, and your kids are all up in your business every waking moment of your blissful existence, then finding time to figure out this whole in-and-out business is pretty much non-existent.

The cup instructions actually talk about how these can be left inside your body for up to 12 hours, but if you're on Day 2 or 3, you might need to empty them every 3-4 hours.  So, think about this: you're at work or school, and you now have to do the deed of emptying this bloody vessel in the public washroom at least once (but probably twice) during your day (or else you're back to also wearing a pad to soak up the leakage - in which case, why are you even bothering with a cup?!)  And if it takes you 10 minutes the way it takes me, well, I'm pretty sure nobody's going to be loving that you're on break for so long.

2) Messy Process
I don't care what anyone tells you, menstrual cups are supremely messy.  Like, crime scene levels of gore.  And while these well-intentioned instructions advise you to extract the cup in the shower, most of us don't have the opportunity to jump into a shower during our 10-minute break, or when our kid is wailing on the other side of the bathroom door and trying to barge in.

In the absence of this ideal thrice-daily shower access, then, the toilet is the next best thing.  But you have to get your fingers up into your vaginal canal to remove it, because once the cup "seals" in place, it basically creates a suction inside your body.  You cannot just pull on the stem of the cup and have it come out the way that a tampon string works.  Instead, you've got to take your finger and thumb and shove it inside of you, enough for you to grip the (bloody and slippery) base of the cup.  Then you have to squeeze the base of the cup and wiggle it around until you can break the suction, and then pull the cup out.

Sounds easy, right?  Except in all of the ads, they show you how to do this using toilet paper rolls and clear plexiglass tubes.  Your vaginal canal isn't hard and circular; it's soft and fleshy, and it is really good at squeezing tight, especially when you're feeling panicked because now you're 8 minutes into the process and wondering if you'll need to head to the ER with a very embarrassing story.

And once that little cup does let go, and you sigh with relief as it exits your body, there might likely be residual spray.  As in, red little blood spray from your blood-soaked hand, your cup, or its contents.  And now what?!  You have to dump out the offending contents, find a way to wash that cup, scrub down your own hands, and also clean up the splatter.  It's literally a bloody mess, and it's offensive to bathrooms everywhere (but particularly those public stalls where the sink isn't literally ride beside the toilet).  Hardly the convenience those rosy ads make it out to be.

3)No easy in's and out's
When I was so easily impressed by a celebrity's recommendations, I wasn't thinking very logically.  Do you know what sets Candace Cameron-Bure and I apart (aside from her fame and fortune and skinny body and amazing hair)? She has had several babies, no doubt vaginally.  I have had one baby, and she was cut out of me.  All this to say that I'll bet that CCB's girl bits have had a few good workouts from having had babies the au naturel way, and is probably pretty stretchy.  Mine, however, is not.  That old adage about square pegs and round holes? This is kind of like that; you are literally inserting a very thick and wide, folded silicone cup into a not-so-flexible skinny flesh hole in your privates.  It's potentially very painful, and not the easy peasy process that was promised.

And on the other end of the process, my weak fingers also lack the ability to form a vise-grip on slippery silicone, and my arms are fairly short (as I've discovered from this ordeal).  If you're like me, the tampon is easy because you just have to pull on a string and you're done.  With the cup, you have to find a way to reach between and up (and in!), and grip, and twist, and extract - all the while trying to remain calm because your life keeps flashing before your eyes.  Oh, and the cup - it can scoot *up* the vaginal canal until none of the cup stem is even visible.  You need to use the stem to help coax the cup back down.  But once you locate the stem, you will likely be tempted to just pull that and hope the cup releases; it won't, because of that suction seal.  You don't want to pull too hard on the stem while the seal is active, because then you will feel like your insides are being pulled out of you.  Meanwhile, the cup scoots back up the canal, and you have to do it again and again...which is why it takes up to 10 minutes to get the thing out.

4) Cost
So here's the thing: you only save money with menstrual cups *if* you don't need to use other sanitary products, and you plan to use the same cup for a year.  But for most of us, finding that fit means you'll need to buy 3-5 cups to start with, and you will still need some pads during that first experimentation phase.  The good quality cups are not cheap; we're talking about $30-40CAD per cup.  I have tried a few, and have spent about $140 so far, including buying a special wash for the cups.  That's pretty much what I spend (maybe even more!) for a year's worth of pads or tampons.  And now those dollars will likely go to waste.

Am I going to use menstrual cups ever again?  Highly unlikely, although maybe if my memory fails me one day, and I'm feeling adventurous, I might give one last shot to the cup I recently ordered that is still in the mail.  It's a smaller one than the others I own; maybe size will make a difference (ha!).

But for my peace of mind, likely not.  I don't have that kind of time to spend in high-stress, bloody situations, and I don't love having to clean an entire bathroom after every cup use, and the return on investment for me simply isn't high enough.

I'll support the environment in other ways, instead.