‘Tampon Shrinkflation’ Is Going Viral: Are Tampons Actually Getting Smaller?

Several other women I spoke with reported similar circumstances. “I thought I was getting heavier periods, which is weird because I’m on the pill so I’m usually pretty light,” says Morgan Sullivan, a freelance journalist living in Philadelphia. “But then I saw so many other girls posting about it on socials, and I was like, Oh—that’s it.”

Same with Emily D., a 35-year-old living in Massachusetts. “I thought it was just me, to the point where I brought it up to my doctor—like, Is there something wrong with my period?” she says. It wasn’t until she saw other women posting that she realized it might not be her but the actual tampons. “It’s so insidious, but not surprising, that the tampon companies would just make their products smaller to make us spend more money,” she tells me over DM.

But is that actually what’s going on? It might not be.

Not that I don’t believe women—or my own robust flow—but it’s easy to get caught up in the social media echo chamber when hundreds if not thousands or even millions of others start to share the same POV. Of course, likeminded support is always a good thing, and women’s and reproductive health is undeniably worthy of additional scrutiny. See the return of US abortion bans; there’s plenty of reason to believe the powers that be don’t have exactly have our uterus’s interests at heart.

But this is also why my own doctor keeps telling me to stop googling my symptoms and lurking my health condition subreddits (shoutout to r/POTS): The “paranoia to internet-stranger validation” pipeline is not unlike the path by which conspiracy theories and misinformation spread online. Look how many people are completely convinced that every retail sunscreen causes cancer while conveniently ignoring the fact that we know UV exposure does. It’s a slippery slope, so I was determined to get real, fact-checked answers. Thus I reached out to Tampax to ask: What, if anything, is going on with tampons?

“Tampons are regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and adhere to industry absorbency or size ranges as listed on the side of each package,” a Tampax spokesperson tells Glamour. “The FDA absorbency ranges have not changed since its introduction more than 30 years ago.” These regulations apply to all tampon brands, too, meaning that Tampax and Playtex and OB and so on all must adhere to the same set of guidelines. These can be seen on the chart below.