This Service Could Totally Change The Tampon Game

Have you ever unexpectedly gotten your period (or totally known it was going to happen and just goofed), only to find that you're completely out of the necessary materials in the middle of the night? (Not that there's anything wrong with freebleeding, but there's also no shame if that's not jam.) That's the kind of night tampon subscription service S. Rosa Organic hopes to help you avoid in the future; in fact, that's exactly the situation creator Radha Perera found herself in a few years ago. One irritable (and expensive) 3 a.m. trip to the corner store later, Perera was determined to find a better way to buy tampons — starting with their ingredients.

"As an everyday girl, I was getting too comfortable with the current ways of accessing tampons and constantly using synthetic ones," Perera tells Bustle over email. Of course, this begs the question of what harm could come from synthetic tampons, and therein lies the problem: We aren't really sure. There's little significant research on the subject, and Perera pointed out that many tampon companies aren't required to disclose their ingredients thanks to their classification as "medical devices" by the FDA.

The idea is that we might want to be a little wary of what we're actually putting into our bodies, especially when we're looking at something we use every single month for so many years. That's where S. Rosa Organic comes in: If the Australian company's Kickstarter gets enough funding, the tampon subscription service promises to deliver fully organic cotton tampons straight to your door.

Each pack contains a zippered tampon pouch capable of holding 16 tampons and a supply of 48 regular tampons intended to last three months. However, Perera notes that once S. Rosa Organic's website is up and running, users will have the option of choosing how often a pack should be delivered — every month, every four months, and so on. "Everyone is different, after all!" she writes.

Having organic tampons delivered to your door sounds expensive, and it kind of is: A pack of 48 S. Rosa Organic tampons costs around $24 AUD, or $17 USD, while a 50-count box of Tampax tampons costs a little less than $12 USD. However, Perera notes that this upfront cost comes out to less than $10 per month in AUD, and she believes that the potential health benefits outweigh the literal cost. "The benefit is that you know what’s going in your body every single month," she told the Daily Mail. S. Rosa is one of a growing number of companies aiming for tampon transparency; others include Cora and LOLA.

"I think when we go about our lives and automatically buy synthetic tampons or tampons last minute, we can forget that it's still largely a problem and an inconvenience," Perera tells Bustle. Part of this inconvenience lies in the infamous "tampon tax," aka the sales tax applied to tampons because they aren't considered "necessities" like groceries or medical purchases. (In fact, they're even considered a "luxury" product — something which, understandably, has a lot of people who get periods every month riled up.) In an effort to draw attention to the tampon tax, Perera has devoted a section of the Kickstarter to petitions calling for an end to the tax.

"It's so important that around the world this is addressed and the petitions are signed," she writes.

If you're interested, you can support the S. Rosa Organic on its Kickstarter page.

Images: Pexels, s. rosa organic (2)