Graphic by Megan Eloise/The Gazelle

For many years, I thought my options for menstrual care products were limited to tampons and pads. Choosing how I wanted my cotton served, cylindrical or flat, was the easy part. After that, my choices in the feminine hygiene aisle — are women’s bodies still considered unhygienic? — multiplied. If I were a tampon user, did I want cardboard, plastic, bleached, unbleached, sport, compact, light flow, regular, super or super-plus products? If a pad user, did ultra thin, extra wide, with wings, without wings, scented, unscented, overnight or thong match my needs? Options for these two types of products seemed endless. Though only comprising half of an aisle in the pharmacy, the rows of blue boxes I grew to associate with rituals of womanhood often made me feel dizzyingly lost. Perhaps, though, this diversity of choice in tampons and pads reflects a paucity of choice among period care products in general. I was relieved when I finally made a choice that I feel matters: buying a menstrual cup.

Menstrual cups are better known by specific brand names, such as The Keeper, DivaCup and Mooncup, because people hate the word menstrual and are probably less than enthused to hear it followed by the name of a drinking vessel. No matter their name, most menstrual cups are similar: a reusable, bell-shaped rubber cup that sits in the lower vaginal canal to collect menstrual flow. To use, you empty the vessel into a toilet, rinse or wipe it and reinsert. Beyond a few small differences — mostly to protect company patents — there is generally only one choice users make: buying a Model 1 or a larger Model 2 if you are older than 30 or have had a child.

The menstrual cup is the best thing to happen to feminine hygiene since the tampon. In fact, modern designs for both were released onto the U.S. market in the 1930s. According to legend, in the 1920s a Kimberly-Clark employee poked holes into a condom stuffed with Kotex pads and pitched it as a menstrual solution. A man named Earle Haas released a more successful variation a decade later; it was called Tampax, a combination of the words tampon and vaginal pack. If you ever wondered why the tampon is cylindrical even though the human vagina is not, it may be because men designed the prototypes. In 1937, U.S. American actress Leona Chalmers patented a latex menstrual cup named Tassette, or "little cup" in French. During World War II, women’s physical activity and employment increased, and thus so did the demand for products that allowed mobility. But because U.S. rubber supplies were scarce during the war, Tassette production faltered. Meanwhile, the popularity of tampons skyrocketed. A further detriment to Tassette’s success, in addition to the cultural assumption that touching one’s vagina while applying a menstrual care product was masturbatory and unhygienic, was that the cups were a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Tampax, on the other hand, had to be ordered monthly and thus had much more sustainable profit margins.

The larger point, of course, is that a woman’s period should be nobody’s goddamned business, and certainly not Big Business'. Corporations that own so-called feminine hygiene brands — primarily Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Kimberly-Clark — design their products and advertising to make consumers think that the only palatable solution for periods is the monthly purchase of disposable merchandise. The cup better conforms, literally and figuratively, to women’s expectations of independence and privacy. To begin, menstrual cups require much less time and financial investments. Most run about 130 AED and last anywhere from one to ten years. On the other hand, the average U.S. woman who uses disposable menstrual products must purchase almost 17,000 in her lifetime. You do the math: there is no comparison in value. With those numbers, it is also easy to figure which product’s environmental footprint is smallest.

The menstrual cup is better not only for the outer but also inner landscape. Despite a proposal that has been sitting on the U.S. American Congress’ desk since 1997, the FDA in the U.S. has not yet investigated the effects of “dioxins, synthetic fibers, chlorine, and other components (including contaminants and substances used as fragrances, colorants, dyes, and preservatives)” found in materials used for menstrual care. The bill is the result of an earlier misfortune for the cup and women’s causes, one that flew on the wings of an apparent feminist victory. In 1976, tampons were reclassified as medical devices as opposed to cosmetics, but although cosmetics manufacturers now need to list ingredients on packaging, no such law applies to medical devices. You may know what’s in your blush, but not what you’re putting into your body. Fortunately, menstrual cups are free of materials so amenable to bacteria and are safe for 12-hour wear, 50 percent longer than absorbent cloth.

Perhaps the greatest irony about the market’s most popular menstrual care items is that they are packaged and promoted as outstandingly discreet, yet they are anything but. Designs for compact tampons flood the market, while Tampax’s Radiant line boasts a “softer, quieter wrapper to keep it a secret.” The cup, the least conspicuous product, does not need camouflage wrappers or self-combusting applicators because it is reusable and holds approximately five times the amount of fluid that a tampon can. People can even have sex while wearing some types of menstrual cups;  it is so faithful to a woman’s privacy that one of my friends claims she often doesn’t bother to mention to her partner when she’s menstruating.

If the idea of collecting your flow in a cup grosses you out, why is collecting it in a cotton vagina pack or partial diaper less so? No amount of brand loyalty can make me continue to shove tampons into my bra or shimmy them up my sleeves before visiting the washroom when a better option exists. Of course, putting a personally untested product into my body was a bit unnerving, but I viewed trying the menstrual cup as an opportunity to make my life a bit more convenient. Call me an optimist, but I’m pretty sold on this cup-half-full thing.