The Love Your Period Campaign: Behind the Scenes

The ‘Love Your Period’ Campaign was set up by 17-year-old Molly Fenton in March 2019 and is run by Molly and her 12-year-old sister Tilly.

Hi there! My name is Molly, founder of the LYP campaign. After spending time off school due to illness, I decided to take part in my local Rotary Club’s Youth Speaks competition, where I wrote a relayed a 6 minute speech titled “If we breakdown period stigma, can we more effectively tackle period poverty in the UK?”.

The speech was AMAZING and myself and my team were thrilled, however, the results were displeasing. My team’s speech was deemed “inappropriate”- from that moment anger sparked in me as I’d realise this judgement had been swayed by period stigma itself! This made me realise that if I don’t stand up, nothing will change. The Rotary Club however enjoyed the speech, invited me back a month later to relay the speech to all Rotary Club members, and they aided me in starting an Instagram page called ‘Love Your Period’.

The Love Your Period campaign support blew up- we were having an incredible number of followers join us every day and people started recognizing me in my town center. We had 1000 followers by May, a journalist had written an article on us and we’d helped petition towards the Welsh Period Dignity Scheme.

Today, the Love Your Period Campaign is well known across the UK. We run an Instagram (@loveyourperiod), Twitter (@loveyourperiod1) and Facebook (The Love Your Period Campaign).

There is no legal obligation for menstrual product manufacturers to list ingredients on their packaging, therefore it may come to a surprise to you to learn that up to 90% of your period products you are using are PLASTIC. Not only is this causing huge environmental issues, but a detrimental effect on our bodies.

Due to being used in such an intimate area, we are absorbing plastic up to 10x FASTER than if it were just on our skin. The plastic polymers propel oestrogen mimicking hormones into the female body causing a grave imbalance of oestrogen and associated hormones. Now consider this for a second:                    

 1. Oestrogen supports thyroxine hormone binding with proteins. This is crucial for our metabolism, digestion and excretion.

2. Oestrogen supports Serotonin hormone- which is the hormone that gives us a sense of wellbeing.                                   

3. Oestrogen supports dopamine and ACH – which are hormones that support motor function and movement.                      

4. Oestrogen is a sex hormone and is crucial for a woman’s period and fertility.

Any imbalance in this one hormone can cause major disruption to a woman’s hormonal eco-system. Studies as recent as 2017 now indicate that an oestrogen imbalance in the mother when pregnant, could impact a female foetus she may be gestating potentially paving the way for deeply infiltrative endometriosis (DIE), which is a debilitating ailment. Of course, it’s hard to establish direct causality between using plastic period products and all the above.

That’s because it’s hard to isolate a person from their external environment (such as pollution), the diet they consume, their lifestyle and genetics to arrive at that conclusion. It is not easy to say – that this one product is directly responsible for causing infertility or cancer. But consider this – for a whole century cigarette manufacturers used the same argument to promote smoking. Do we see many people pick up a smoke these days? If not, why? A favourite quote of mine from co-founder of the Lux Store Organic London-based organic period products company:

“The choice is simple; you can wait many years to see suffering
and experience it yourself. Or you can sign this petition to see for
yourself what ingredients go into the making of these products and make an informed choice.”

Period Products are used so intimately, and we need to easily and clearly know what’s in them and what is being absorbed into our bodies. Just like food manufacturers, it should be compulsory for period product manufacturers to clearly state their ingredients on packaging. We are fighting for this more than ever now. You can find all our updates on this petition on all our social media pages.

Love Your Period’s purpose is to remove period poverty for all over the UK, help eradicate period stigma globally. We pride ourselves on creating a safe space aiming to get everyone despite gender identification, to accept and love periods! And we won’t stop, until our mission is complete!

Our latest petition is titled: Make Period Product Manufacturers Put Ingredients on Packaging when being Sold in the UK! This is the UK link: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/277590 We have until April 21st 2020 (6 months) to get at least 10,000 signatures!