Health

Teen Girls Join Forces to Convince People That Eating Used Tampons Is Normal

Chaotic good.
Hannah Smothers
Brooklyn, US
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Teenage girls are perhaps the most powerful cohort—I can’t name a single time in my life that they haven’t been terrifying to me, a former teenage girl myself. As further proof, I offer this recent flex of the teen-girl hivemind: an absolutely pointless, viral-ish hoax that people eat their tampons during their period in order to reabsorb the blood and stay alive.

This started, as most great things do, on TikTok. Caroline Majcher, an 18-year-old in Canada, posed a video expressing shock that guys somehow have no idea “that girls eat their tampon after they’re done with it to reabsorb all the blood that they just lost.”

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It could’ve ended there—if not for the supreme, unspoken power of teen girls online. As BuzzFeed News points out, other women on TikTok started posting their own versions of the same video.

“Why do boys still not believe that we eat our tampons to reabsorb the blood we lost??,” reads the text on one such addition to what is now a tampon-eating canon. “I realize it sounds dumb but like fr.”

“I thought I could probably make up a lie about girls and any boy would believe it,” Majcher told BuzzFeed News. It remains unclear whether anyone actually believes this is true (probably someone, somewhere does), but it is a stellar addition to the genre of teen girls seeing a prank all the way through (lest we forget the balloon prank of 2017 that had Pennsylvania police legitimately terrified).

Veering into earnest territory: The bliss here comes from that Majcher doesn’t appear to have conspired with others to perpetuate this batshit, pointless hoax. Teens on TikTok saw an opportunity to mess around and convince guys that eating used tampons is not just normal, but healthy, even, and ran with it. To me? Beautiful.

(Ethically, I have to tell you that it’s absolutely not healthy to eat a used tampon or other used period products. Please do not try this at home.)

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