Around 1920, a Hungarian-born pediatrician working in Vienna named Béla Schick received a bunch of ten dark red roses. A maid placed them in a vase of water. By the next morning they were dead, and when Schick made inquiries, he learned she had been menstruating. From that single observation he proposed that menstruating women secreted a toxin through their skin, which he called “menotoxin,” potent enough to wilt flowers and keep bread from rising.
The theory was absurd even by the standards of its time, yet it circulated in serious medical journals for decades. Schick was still repeating the story to colleagues in 1954. The Lancet hosted a lively debate on menstrual “pollution” as late as 1974, with further correspondence in 1977. For most of the 20th century, the fluid at the center of female reproductive health wasn't studied. It was avoided. Where's the proof? Start with the tampon.
Up until a few years ago, menstrual-product absorbency was tested with saline rather than blood, using an industry standard that dates back to the 1980s. In 2023, researchers at Oregon Health & Science University finally tested 21 menstrual products using expired human blood, not salt water, and found that real-world capacities could differ dramatically from the labels.
That study exposed how modern medicine had been trying to understand menstrual bleeding without ever actually using menstrual blood. In the real world, when a clinician is trying to judge whether someone's bleeding is unusually heavy, the conversation usually hinges on how many pads or tampons she goes through. Those same period products had never been well characterized using blood. Baffling logic. The witches would never.
Then 2024 brought another first. Researchers at Columbia and UC Berkeley published what they described as the the first study measuring metals in tampons. They tested 30 tampons across 14 brands and detected all 16 metals they screened for, including lead, arsenic and cadmium. The study didn’t show that tampons are poisoning us, and it never claimed to. It measured what sits in the material, not what gets into a body. But doesn’t it make you wonder?
Hundreds of millions of people have used tampons and similar period products internally, every month, for generations. Yet it took until 2024 to ask crucial questions about the bodies they’re entering, and until 2026 to start to get some answers. And the gap isn’t limited to period products. Between 1977 and 1993, FDA guidance recommended excluding women of reproductive potential from early clinical trials. It was written so broadly that it swept in women using contraception and those with vasectomized partners. The funding never caught up either. A 2025 National Academies analysis revealed that just 8.8% of NIH research grant spending between 2013 and 2023 went to women's health. Regrettably, the share fell further across that decade, from 9.7% to 7.9%.There’s no oversight here. It went down.
The Menstrual Research Gap Is FInally Closing
Now the good part. The era of neglect is ending, and the shift happened fast. In just the last two years, peer-reviewed journals, such as Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Scientific Reports, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, and Annals of Medicine and Surgery, have published research treating menstrual blood not as waste to be managed but as a biofluid worth studying on its own terms. Science is only starting to reckon with what this particular blood contains: endometrial cells, immune cells, proteins, microRNA, and mesenchymal stem cells.
Few tissues in the human body shed and rebuild themselves as completely, or as regularly, as the uterine lining does, and it does so without scarring. In a dramatic pivot, researchers now describe menstrual blood as one of the most “information-rich” fluids the body produces, capable of reflecting what’s happening not just in the uterus, but across the immune and metabolic system. Recently, researchers have shown that menstrual blood collected on a simple pad can detect high-risk HPV with accuracy comparable to a clinician-collected cervical sample [1] and that it can potentially flag molecular signatures of endometriosis, opening the door to a noninvasive way to detect the disease before laparoscopy is needed [2].
Menstrual blood can also carry a marker already used by doctors to monitor diabetes, HbA1c, as well as those linked to blood-sugar control and other aspects of metabolic and hormonal health [3], [4]. One FDA-cleared pad-based test already collects menstrual blood for HbA1c monitoring. No needle or speculum needed. What's next? The humble sanitary pad may be poised to become a sophisticated wearable health monitor.
From ‘Menotoxin’ to Molecular Goldmine
Two threads of research are now advancing at once. The first examines menstrual blood as a diagnostic window, offering a needle-free way to screen for conditions from HPV to endometriosis. The second explores it as a therapeutic source, with the stem cells it contains being studied for tissue repair. A substance culture taught us to conceal for a century is now being taken seriously as legitimate medical evidence.
The blood didn’t change. Who was willing to look did.
The most immediate application is screening. In a study of more than 3,000 women published via The BMJ and led by researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, menstrual blood collected on a simple pad detected precancerous cervical changes with 92 to 95% sensitivity, functionally on par with a standard cervical smear, and identified HPV, the virus responsible for roughly 90% of cervical cancers. Because the sample collects itself during a period a person is already having, researchers see it as a way to reach the estimated one in four U.S. women who are behind on cervical cancer screening. That matters most for those who avoid pelvic exams because of trauma, disability, cultural stigma, or simple access.
Endometriosis is the other major target. The condition affects an estimated one in ten women of reproductive age, yet the average diagnostic delay still runs seven to nine years, largely because confirming it has required laparoscopic surgery. Dr. Christine Metz’s team at the Feinstein Institutes and other researchers have found that endometrial cells shed in menstrual blood behave differently in people with the condition, opening the door to a noninvasive way to detect the disease before laparoscopy is needed [2].
Menstrual blood can also carry HbA1c, the marker doctors already use to track long-term blood sugar [3], [4]. One FDA-cleared pad-based test already collects menstrual blood at home for exactly that, though it’s cleared for monitoring women who already have diabetes, not for diagnosing or screening it. Narrow, deliberately. No needle or speculum required. What's next? The humble sanitary pad may be poised to become a sophisticated wearable health monitor.
These are the kind of results that make you wonder what else got thrown out.
Reclaiming the Power of Our Sacred Bleeds
While the research world works to formalize the future of menstrual blood as a diagnostic and regenerative tool, herbalists have spent centuries tending to the bodies that produce it. Scientists and academics will continue striving to learn more from dissecting the contents of menstrual fluid under a microscope. However, some wisdom is more ancient, felt and embodied rather than “proven.” A variety of botanicals have been used for centuries to provide support for the uterus, to foster hormone harmony, and to nourish the nervous system from one cycle to the next. For the same phases now being mapped, molecule by molecule, in the studies above, traditional herbalism already built a tailored, restorative ritual for exactly that need and season.
Moon Blood & Mother Earth
Anthropologist Alma Gottlieb’s landmark research, compiled with Thomas Buckley in Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, pushed back against a once-dominant assumption in her own field that menstrual taboo was universal, and universally about shame. Studying communities from long-house dwellers in North Borneo to farming households in West Africa, Gottlieb and her team unearthed a more layered story. Yes, there were customs that restricted contact during menstruation, but also traditions that treated the same blood as evidence of power, fertility, and life-giving force.
That duality can also be seen across documented Indigenous practices in North America. Among Ojibwe communities, a menstruating woman traditionally retreated to a small moon lodge, a period of rest away from daily labor, ceremony, and food preparation. Not as punishment, as an acknowledgment of her potency. The retreat was a traditional form of communal care, with female relatives bringing food and marking the lodge with cedar boughs to signal a woman was in her time. Among the Hupa people of Northern California, a girl’s first period was marked by the Flower Dance, a multi-day coming-of-age ceremony involving ritual runs and river bathing. That practice was publicly revived in 2014, after roughly 150 years.
A Return to Womb Wisdom
Historically, researchers who claimed they wanted to understand the uterus drew blood from an arm. Menstrual blood was seen as something to work around, not to study or sample, and certainly not a place where useful information might live. Rarely has this precious lifeblood been treated as the rich source of biological information it is, until now.
What’s changing in 2026 is Western medicine’s attempt to make sense of what our ancestors innately and eternally honored: moon blood, ritualized in sacred ceremonies and tracked alongside Nature’s own cycles. Across the fertile years and into the transition beyond them, the same body keeps offering information, if anyone's willing to read it.
As the science evolves, we invite you to return to a body of knowledge that is both folkloric and clinical, one that never actually went away.
She’s here. Let her move through you.
Explore Our New Menstrual Tea Kits
* These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any diseases.
The Late Summer Sale promotion is valid from August 22, 2026, to August 26, 2026, ending at 11:59 p.m. PST. This promotion is valid online with use of code LATESUMMER30. 30% off site-wide. Discount applies automatically at checkout. There is no minimum purchase required. Shipping is not included. Promotion cannot be combined with other promotions, discount codes, or offers unless otherwise stated. All order cancellations will automatically incur a 10% credit card and restocking fee. Once an order is placed, we are unable to make adjustments, including address changes or shipping refunds. Store Pick-Ups: For Brooklyn, NY, and Venice Beach, CA, store pick-ups, any order not collected within 10 business days will be automatically canceled.
