*For decades, Black women have used various vaginal products to maintain feminine hygiene, unaware that many of these douches stem from racist stereotypes about the odor of dark skin.
One of the most startling examples is Lysol, marketed as a feminine hygiene product from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Advertised as a “gentle and trustworthy” aid, Lysol was promoted as a douching agent and even became a top-selling product during the Great Depression, MadameNoire reports. This surprising chapter of American history highlights the troubling ways products were marketed in the past.
“We as gynecologists realized a long time ago that vaginal douching was just not a good thing for women to do,” said Tacoma McKnight, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, The Washington Post reports.
“There’s this unrealistic standard of what a vulva and vagina should smell like, look like, feel like,” said Fatima Daoud Yilmaz, an OB/GYN in New York. “People with vulvas and vaginas are spending their money chasing after an ideal that’s not rooted in reality or being made to think that their normal, healthy bodily functions are somehow pathologic and need to be addressed.”
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A 1958 Lysol douching ad featured in the Black newspaper Daily Defender in Chicago emphasized to Black women that “you can be confident in your freshness.”
“By 1911, doctors had recorded 193 Lysol poisonings and five deaths from uterine irrigation,” read one report from Mother Jones, per MadameNoire. “Despite reports to the contrary, Lysol was aggressively marketed to women as safe and gentle. Once the formula replaced cresol with ortho-hydroxyphenyl, Lysol was pushed as a germicide good for cleaning toilet bowls and treating ringworm.”
A clip went viral recently of a Black man explaining how he learned from his grandmother that Lysol was once used as a feminine hygiene product. Hear what he had to say in the X/Twitter video below.
Finding out Lysol was originally a feminine hygiene product was not on my bingo card for today. pic.twitter.com/kwZUbInfnW
— Monique | ??? (@TechnicurlSpprt) June 18, 2024
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