Mind Over Matter Psych Talks | Season 3 Episode 1 | Written Reflection

There’s a particular kind of unease that comes from learning something uncomfortable about a product you’ve trusted since puberty. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of the Free State published findings that did exactly that for a lot of South African women, myself included. Their study, which tested sanitary pads and pantyliners sold across South African retailers, found that every single product tested contained at least two chemicals known to interfere with the body’s hormone system. Not just the cheaper, less known brands either. Products marketed as organic or free from harmful chemicals turned up the same result. The chemicals in question, phthalates, bisphenols and parabens, are already associated in existing research with reproductive harm, hormonal disruption and increased cancer risk.

Before going further, it’s worth being precise about what the study actually says, because precision matters more than alarm here. Researchers didn’t claim a single pad poses a defined danger, and they didn’t set out a strict threshold for how many years of exposure counts as risky. What they described instead was cumulative, real-world exposure. Most women use menstrual products for several days a month, repeated for decades, often adding up to somewhere in the region of four hundred and fifty periods across a lifetime. That’s not a single data point being tested. It’s small, repeated amounts of these chemicals, in direct contact with some of the most absorbent tissue in the body, month after month, for the better part of thirty or more years. That accumulation, rather than any single exposure, is what the researchers flagged as the genuine concern.

It’s tempting, when news like this breaks, to shrug and say everything causes cancer these days, so why worry about this specifically. There’s a grain of truth buried in that response. We are surrounded by low-level chemical exposure constantly, in packaging, in cosmetics, in the air itself. But not all exposures carry equal weight, and treating them as interchangeable actually does harm, because it shuts down exactly the kind of scrutiny that improves safety over time. Public health doesn’t advance by assuming the worst about everything equally. It advances by asking specific, evidence-based questions about specific products, and holding manufacturers and regulators accountable for the answers.

There’s a psychological dimension to this news that’s easy to overlook if you only think about it as a chemistry story. Learning that something this personal, this intimate, might carry a hidden health cost tends to do more than inform. It unsettles. It can spark real anxiety about fertility or long-term health, a quiet erosion of trust in companies and regulators that were simply assumed to have this handled, and sometimes a low hum of shame or discomfort that’s hard to name precisely because periods already carry so much unspoken stigma. When people learn that their bodies weren’t as protected as they believed, it doesn’t just register as a fact. It shakes something more fundamental, a basic sense of safety in the ordinary products of daily life. That reaction isn’t an overreaction. It’s a reasonable psychological response to a breach of trust, and it deserves to be treated as such rather than dismissed as panic.

Layered on top of the chemical exposure question is a much older, harder problem, period poverty, which remains widespread across South Africa despite real progress like the removal of tax on sanitary products. Period poverty means not having reliable access to safe, clean menstrual products, and its consequences are concrete rather than abstract. Girls miss school. Women use substitutes that were never designed for the purpose, often out of necessity rather than ignorance. And here’s the part that makes the chemical findings even harder to sit with: the cheapest, most accessible products tend to be the least tested and, going by this research, not necessarily the safest either. Meanwhile, products that carry independent safety certification or are made with organic materials tend to cost more, putting them out of reach for exactly the women who might have the least room to absorb any additional health risk.

That gap raises an uncomfortable ethical question, one worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Should feeling safe and comfortable during a period depend on income. When safer options are effectively reserved for whoever can afford them, the system is communicating something about whose comfort and whose health are treated as a genuine priority, whether anyone intends that message or not. It also exposes a deeper pattern that goes well beyond sanitary products specifically. Women’s health research has historically been underfunded and under-prioritised across the board, often only receiving serious attention once public pressure forces the issue. Menstrual health in particular has long been treated as a niche or faintly embarrassing topic rather than a mainstream public health concern, which helps explain why ingredient disclosure on period products has, until studies like this one, remained largely optional in a way it simply isn’t for food or medicine.

None of this is meant to induce panic, and it’s worth saying clearly that fear isn’t a particularly useful response here either. What actually helps is information, because information restores something that a finding like this can otherwise quietly take away, a sense of agency. Looking for independent safety certifications on menstrual products, understanding that reusable options like menstrual cups, period underwear or certified cloth pads reduce repeated chemical contact over time, and treating ingredient transparency as something worth expecting rather than a bonus, all of that shifts a person from passive consumer back into informed decision maker. Psychologically, that shift matters more than it might seem. Agency, the felt sense that you have real choices and real information to make them with, is one of the more consistently protective factors for wellbeing that exists, particularly in situations where trust has just taken a hit.

Menstrual health, in the end, isn’t a niche topic and it was never only a woman’s issue. It’s a public health matter, a human rights matter tied directly to school attendance and economic participation, and yes, a genuine mental health matter too, because feeling safe in your own body is not a small thing to have quietly called into question. Conversations like this one exist to push back against decades of menstrual health being treated as too minor, too private, or too awkward to warrant serious scrutiny. Asking the uncomfortable question, what’s actually in this, and why wasn’t I told, is not paranoia. It’s exactly the kind of asking that eventually changes what gets tested, what gets disclosed, and whose comfort gets taken seriously in the first place.

Mind Over Matter.

Disclaimer: This article is for general psychoeducational and informational purposes only. This article draws on peer-reviewed research published by the University of the Free State, alongside general reporting on menstrual health and period poverty in South Africa.