Mooncups have been a growing source of fascination over the last decade - making the transition from weird hippie shit, to something your chic work colleague might currently have up her vagina. When I put a callout for friends who used them, I was pretty much inundated with messages from people I wouldn't have expected to have joined the Mooncup gang. Cool people. Cool people who made me realise that my prejudice against mooncups was probably unfounded, and I needed to sort it out... but not just yet.
Not until I'd asked every question I could think of, and really thought about it from all angles. So, I rounded up four mooncup users who will remain anonymous, and got them to explain everything in painstaking detail just so I can make an informed decision as to whether to flush the tampons once and for all. FYI, I've woven all their quotes into one, so they sound like one person. Creepy, but effective.
How do you not spill it?
'You kind of hover over the loo, put your fingers up your vag to kind of grab hold of the cup bit, and then you pull it out slowly. When it’s just out you can tip it into the loo, and if you’ve managed to hover in the right place then the tipping goes straight into the loo bowl. I think they recommend that you pull it out by the stem (haven’t looked at the instructions for bloody ages), but I always kind of thought that was a bit unwieldy and might come out really fast and flick blood everywhere.'
'I've managed to get period in my hair (the hair on my head - and I'm blonde, an anonymous blonde). But I've alway been a messy perioder anyway- I only own black pants, so it's not the mooncup's fault. You just pull your mooncup out whilst sitting on the loo so the blood goes into the bowl making it look like an extreme art installation/ribena advert. You do end up with serial killer hands after emptying your mooncup, though.'
How do you know when to change it?
'They say between 4 to 8 hours, but there's no risk of TSS so it doesn't matter much if you keep it in for longer. At the beginning, you take it out every four hours, and then you see how full it is, so can gauge how often you need to change it depending on your flow.'
Do you ever accidentally wee in it?
'It would be quite hard to do this accidentally because your mooncup in is in your vagina and wee comes out of your urethra (latin, oooh). If you were drunk and emptying your mooncup into the loo then did a wee at the same time then this could possibly happen. But wee is sterile right?? As long as its yours...'
Doesn't it just... fall out?
'NO. If anything, the opposite. The mooncup forms a vacuum with your vagina so that girl is going nowhere, unless you pinch it (technical term) with your fingers to break said vacuum. The main brand of Mooncup in the UK only do two sizes: A) which means you've had a baby B) which means you haven't. Despite what they say, you cannot use the 'no baby' mooncup for your first ever period because it is huge. There are smaller ones available online. Buy them. They are softer and less traumatic for the old kegels.'
'Tampons don't fall out and this is a lot wider than a tampon. If anything it stays in place better - the ridges up your vagina help it stay in place.'
'I was surprised by the angle of my vagina – I think I always thought it went more upwards – it goes more backwards that I realised. Should probably have worked this out before – don’t quite know how sex would work if my vagina was actually at the angle I had thought it was. I blame the diagrams they used to show us in Biology.'
What do they feel like?
'They're really springy because of the kind of plastic; they sometimes make a funny squelchy noise when you take them out or put them in. They feel nicer going in than tampons do, as they don't have that horrible dry consistency.'
'Just like a tampon, right at the end of your period if you’re still using a mooncup and there’s not much blood then you might feel it a bit because I guess it’s all a bit drier.'
How do you wash it out? Isn't it annoying?
'Use a disabled loo if you can. If not, just tip the blood out and whack the mooncup back up and give it a really thorough soap-and-hot-water rinse when you can.'
'It can be a bit awkward if you need to wash it out in a public toilet, but you can take a bottle of water into a cubicle with you, or you can go one time without rinsing and then make sure you do it the next time. But yeah, that can be annoying.'
How do you properly wash it?
'Er, yeah, you’re supposed to sterilise it after each time you use it, which basically means boiling it in a saucepan or putting it in the dishwasher (rinse it first so there's no bloody bits on it). Dishwashers sterilise things automatically - I think that if something hits 70 degrees then it kills pretty much everything, so if you let it boil on a stove for a few minutes, it should be good. Most people have a separate little saucepan though because otherwise some people get icky. I generally find these things hilarious but I know previous housemates have probably found them awkward or disgusting. I guess after a while you don’t really want to get it out in public because it changes colour a bit.'
Can it tip out inside your vagina?!
'WHAT DO YOU THINK A VAGINA IS? HAVE YOU MET ONE BEFORE? Of course not, it just stays in place. It sits very snugly.'
'What's it like, seeing your blood every month?'
'I was surprised by how much blood there was each month (partly this was because I had a copper coil), but I think I always read that it was about a tablespoon in those growing up books and it was more like a litre. Not quite, but seriously, like 4 or 5 tablespoons. I was also surprised by how much solid blood clotty stuff comes out – you don’t really notice it with tampons but I guess because it’s womb-lining it’s not all totally liquid.'
How many do you go through?
'It depends on you, because it changes colour a bit as it gets older (and stained with blood, hahahaha) but you can have one for the year. Or change it every six months. A year is probably the longest you should have the same one, though.'
Alright so, we've learned that it's like a sort of clotty science experiment. That it doesn't fall out. That you have to boil it in a saucepan or put it in a dishwasher. But that, if you compare it with tampons, it's sort of the same grossness level while being way cheaper because you can just have one for the whole year. And everyone I spoke to was basically evangelical about them, so that has to count for something.
But I'm still not fully convinced, sorry.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.