For those of us who menstruate, unexpected periods are basically a universal experience. Even if you track your cycle down to a T, sometimes your body just decides to switch things up — and those are always the days you don’t have any spare period products on hand. Wouldn’t it be nice if every public restroom had a stash of tampons or pads available?
Egal’s Pads On A Roll wants to make that happen, and they’re targeting a place where surprise periods are especially stressful: the airport.
And we’re not talking about just throwing few boxes next to the sink and calling it a day. Pads On A Roll actually look like toilet paper rolls and are designed to “mirror the logistics of stocking toilet paper in bathrooms,” even down to using the same distributors, according to a Egal press release shared with SheKnows yesterday. Pads On A Roll can either sit on a toilet paper dispenser (like the photo above) or in its own special, labeled dispenser (below), which “takes less than five minutes to install,” the company says.
The ultimate goal is to have a roll of pads in every public or shared bathroom, and Egal says they’ve already installed products in more than 1,700 schools and other public places like libraries, museums, and parks.
Airports are the next stop, and if you’ve traveled through the largest concourse of the Denver International Airport, maybe you’ve already seen Pads On A Roll in action — they’re currently installed in bathroom stalls throughout that terminal and in employee bathrooms. No more emergency runs to the nearest concourse shop? Sounds good to us.
The best part, for us, is how accessible the pads are: you just roll one off like a piece of toilet paper, and you don’t even have to leave your stall to do it. They’re a great solution to those surprise periods teens get at school, too; no shuffling a tampon or pad into their pocket in a silent classroom or whispering to a friend for supplies. Not to mention that the pads are free to use, saving teens money — and at airports, you don’t have to make a supply run to the nearest in-terminal shop.
“Period products could — and should — be delivered as reliably and conveniently as toilet paper,” Penelope Finnie, co-founder and CEO of Egal, said in the press release. “It’s high time we made this much easier for people on the move.” We second that. Period poverty is still a major issue in the US and globally, and there’s no reason why every menstruator shouldn’t have access to period products — including when your period hits unexpectedly at school, in a museum, or while traveling.
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