The Arbolog |

Just some disclosure off the top: I have not been paid or asked to write this review. I bought a Diva Cup from my local London Drugs for $39.99 about three years ago. You can buy one too, if you want.

Okay, first of all, I have been waffling on writing this review. Funny, I can tell you all about childbirth and breastfeeding and baby poop and ulcerative colitis and whatever else. But menstruation is taboo, more than anything else. Girls tend to think that menstruation is something you don’t really talk about, and although my mom was awesome when my period started and got me a starter pack of all the standard available goodies out there and was happy to show me how to use them or tell me anything I wanted to know about how it all worked, I know I’m not alone when I say I don’t really talk about my monthly cycle with many people outside of my husband, my midwife,  my doctor, and perhaps my closest friends. Because really, does anyone actually want to hear about it? Meh, not really.

Don’t want to know what I use to deal with my period? Then stop now, and go check out this awesome site about eating locally.

The Diva Cup is one of a number of kinds of menstrual cup – There’s the Moon Cup, The Keeper (a latex rubber version), and Lunette (not yet approved for sale in Canada, although silicone already is) and probably others I don’t know about.

I ended up buying it because I had it suggested to me to try by a friend,  and then noticed it at the store, and read the box and decided to give it a whirl. I bought myself the size 2 (there are two sizes) because of my age, and the same size is appropriate to me postnatal as well. At the time, I was not even pregnant. I tried it once or twice when I did not have my period to attempt to get the hang of it, wasn’t thrilled enough to try again, put it back under my sink and promptly forgot all about it. A menstrual cup is designed for collecting the flow, and hanging on to it until you get a chance to dump it. It’s not absorbent, and is, in fact, a silicone cup, that looks similar to an egg cup, with a stem on the end (for grasping).

Diva Cup

Fast forward to this past few months, where I’m more than ever trying to reduce my impact on the world and am looking at my lady bits in a way I did not look at them before I had a child. I flat our care more about what’s going on inside me. Before, menstruation was a function. Now, I see it as a purpose.

I have started reading all sorts of alarming info out there on the intarnets, some of it pretty well researched seemingly from the house of non-crazy [that link is a PDF to an interesting report written by Canadian nutritionist Meghan Telpner] and  and a lot of it flat out false (no, tampons do not contain asbestos). And although the Canadian Cancer Society states that you cannot get cancer from using tampons, there are many people who swear they are toxic to your body on many levels and there is tonnes of anecdotal evidence to support that. But for me, I started feeling guilty about using tampons because they aren’t doing the earth any favours. I’m rethinking the use of tampons and pads from a disposable angle – I am so sick of throwing money literally down the toilet and without truly grasping the consequences of where it goes, and what happens to it when it gets there.

I’m trying hard to find usable alternatives to more or less everything that reeks of consumptive earth dissing, so in my RSS reader these days is stuff like the Glenbrook Zero Waste Challenge, a local group trying to reduce their waste. They put me on to the folks over at the Clean Bin Project, who’ve recently completed a documentary about their project and are cycling across Canada promoting it (hey, Canadian friends, they are looking for places to show their movie. Help them out – check out the trailer, it’s awesome and I can’t wait till they are back in town and we here in New West can watch their documentary.) One of the items Jen at the Clean Bin Project blogs about is the menstrual cup. In her (and my) case, we’re talking about the Diva Cup.

So, seeing the mention for the Diva Cup a while back gave me enough drive to dig it out and give it another shot.

It took me a few tries at insertion despite pretty decent instructions. It feels WEIRD the first few times because the Diva Cup is not designed to go way up inside you like a tampon. It sits more or less at the end of your inner workings so that you can simply reach and grasp that stem with your fingers when it’s time to remove it. Remember, it’s catching the blood, not soaking it up. You are shooting for a horizontal lie rather than a vertical one. Womens’ bits are shaped somewhat like a vase with the small end closest to the real world and so to get the Cup past the smaller neck of the vaginal opening, you fold the cup into quarters and let it pop open once inside. That took a few tries too – figuring out the knack of getting it to pop open at all. I kept having to go in and retrieve it and realign the mark I was shooting for. Also, one complaint? I wish the instructions made mention of potentially pulling at pubic hair. Not everyone grows hair in the same spots, according to my esthetician, but I apparently grow hair in a spot that gets a bit pulled when inserting the Diva Cup. Now that I know that it’s a no longer an issue, but the first time I discovered it, it wasn’t in a way I’d like to repeat.

I also felt the stem of the Diva Cup a bit the first few times while wearing it but now, after a few cycles, I can still notice it only if I try. But it’s a different way of thinking. When you insert a tampon, it’s a no brainer – insert tab a into slot b and you generally do not feel a thing. But I stopped and thought about it. The first few times I used a tampon at 15? I remember it feeling like a giant sub sandwich between my legs.

I practiced with my Diva Cup a half dozen times or so when I did not have my period so that inserting and removing would be simpler and less foreign to me come period time, with the added complication of blood. I recommend doing that as well. You’re going to get intimately involved with what your “output” feels like, so start on a non-period day and get over yourself.

And speaking of blood? What do you do with it? Well, this is how I deal with it, not everyone likely uses the same method. While seated on the toilet, I remove the Diva Cup by grasping the stem, pulling it out sideways, and then once it breaks suction, I tilt it DOWN and let what is collected drain straight into the toilet. Afterward, I wash the Diva Cup in my sink and then clean myself up and then reinsert. Then, when I get up to wash my hands, I give the sink a rinse too. It’s blood. It’s not poison. You can buy Diva Wash, a mild soap, to use on your Cup and your bits, but I haven’t tried it yet.

Because the Diva Cup is made of silicone, you can boil it to give it a good cleaning, and so at the end of my period I do just that. Then it lives in its little fabric sack until the next time. I envision custom made cases on Etsy as soon as I can get my sewing machine back up and running after we move as nothing draws attention to a little fabric bag more than DIVA printed all over a bright purple background. Discreet? No.

You can wear thew Diva Cup over night, and you’ll need to empty it about once every 12 hours or so. The normal entire amount of blood you will shed in your period is 4 ounces (on average, some people it may be more or less!). The Diva Cup can hold one ounce. The chances of leaking because you’ve filled it are slim.

My periods last about 4 days, and at 5-8 tampons a day (we’ll take 6 as an average) I have already saved about 50 tampons from using the Diva Cup.  Yeah. No kidding. 50 tampons is more than what’s in the average sized box. And I’ve barely been using this thing! Do the math on a year. Whether you are talking about the money you’ve saved, the bleached cotton you have not used, or the tampons you have not flushed down the toilet, 50 tampons is HUGE and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Many users also pair their Diva Cups with reusable panty liners. LunaPads are one example, but you can also sew your own.

To sum up: go buy yourself one of these or order it online. Menstrual cups are likely  going to be the norm very soon as more and more people realize it is not icky and  it saves money, the environment and our bodies. Practice until you feel like it’s not a big deal. Then clear out some of that space under your bathroom sink for something you really love, like a cocoa butter body scrub or a sea salt bath soak, and stop flushing your money down the toilet.