Are feminine hygiene products really necessary?
17 June, 2019
Many people use so-called feminine hygiene products — such as intimate cleansers and wipes, douches, and even deodorants — hoping to feel clean and fresh. Do these products really help maintain genital health? In this Spotlight feature, we investigate.
In high school, I used to take a class called "education for health," which was an eclectic mix of general biology and sex education rolled haphazardly into one.
As fun-loving teenagers, many of my classmates would ask questions and recount anecdotes they hoped would spook our long-suffering teacher.
One of their questions, however, genuinely piqued the interest of all the girls in the class.
Her good friend, she said, used intimate cleansers on a daily basis. Despite this, she ended up with a bad vaginal infection. "How was this possible?" my classmate wondered.
Our teacher then explained that overusing cleansers, even ones labeled as "safe" for intimate areas, could upset the delicate intimate balance of the vagina and give rise to infections; but was our teacher right or wrong in her assessment?
So-called feminine hygiene products — which include different types of intimate washes, wipes, shaving gels, and lubricants, but also intimate douches and products for alternative care procedures, such as vaginal steaming — are popular in many countries around the world.
Statistics show that the feminine hygiene market, on the whole, brought millions of dollars into the economies of dozens of countries in 2017 alone, with China and the United States leading the field.
In the U.S. in 2018, sales for vaginal treatments amounted to over $286 million, and those for douches to $41 million. Meanwhile, other types of feminine hygiene products — excluding sanitary napkins, pantyliners, and tampons — brought over $309 million into the economy.
Yet in recent years, one mantra has become pervasive across medical and wellness websites and on educational materials discussing vaginal health — namely, that "the vagina is a self-cleaning oven."
This idea refers to the fact that the vagina naturally produces discharge that eliminates dead cells and bacteria, so there is no need to clean it using soaps, washes, or douches.
So if the vagina does not require any additional cleaning, does this mean that the same rule applies to the vulva? And how can different intimate hygiene products affect vulvovaginal health? These are some of the questions that we will tackle in this Spotlight feature.
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