Menstrual pads: Better for Your Health, Better for the Environment, More Comfortable. Choose any three.

It’s an obvious joke, but a non-obvious design challenge. Almost without exception, focusing on any particular goal comes at the expense of the other ones. So for example consumers are used to the “fact” that if something is good-for-you, or good-for-the-environment, then it is necessarily less comfortable. You’re always told to choose between comfort and health, between feeling dry and being environmental.

The only way to break this false choice is to change the game – and this is exactly what Papaya did.

Before Papaya was ever a company, it was a messy experiment in Shagun’s apartment. (Sadly, she doesn’t have pictures from back then) She knew what she wanted to achieve (some manner of preventing menstrual pads from being a bane on the environment and the enemy of your skin) but she didn’t yet know how. After more than a year of reading and experimenting, an idea emerged…

All other menstrual pads retain menstrual blood using the mechanism of absorption. Because of that, they’re driven either to using Ultra-Absorbent Polymer cores (Plastic-based sponges, with all the health and environmental burdens of using plastics) or to less-absorbent natural fiber cores (thicker, not as dry, but healthier for you and better for the environment).

Shagun changed this game by creating pads that use the body’s own natural mechanism of blood coagulation. Since the pads no longer need to super-absorb in order to retain menstrual blood, they can lose the plastics and rely on Papaya’s bio-sourced coagulating core instead. And since they don’t use absorption, they also can’t un-absorb if squeezed by something like a bicycle seat.

Additionally, the coagulant’s anti-microbial properties help fight odor build-up and skin rashes. Both of these issues are mostly a result of bacterial growth and activity while retained inside the pad, next to your body, and so an anti-microbial core layer greatly alleviates them.

The innovation didn’t stop at the core layer. Once plastics were banished from the core, it became logical to banish them from the entire layer stack that constitutes the pad. And from the backing sheet. And from the packaging.

With Papaya pads, dry means literally dry. Period!