There’s a new period product in town, and the local version is a world first. Alex Casey takes the Hello Disc for a spin, armed with advice from co-creator Robyn McLean.
It didn’t look like something that should go inside a human body.
Imagine, if you will, a vintage swimming cap for a large chinchilla. I stared at the period disc and it stared back me with its huge silicon cyclops eye, unblinking. Threatening. There was no real way to show the sheer scale – I tried to compare it to my hand and then next to a piece of corn, but nothing quite captured the girth. It looked like one of those rubber domes from the ’90s that you would turn inside out and then wait excitedly for it to pop and hit the ceiling.
And yet the locally created Hello Disc, a world first thanks to its patented double loop feature, making it easy to pull out with just one finger, has already sold out of its first batch. “We have sold more discs in two weeks than our best-selling cup in a year, and we are getting requests from all over the world,” says co-creator Robyn McLean, whose first menstrual product was the wildly popular Hello Cup. “It was such a cool feeling, for us the majority of orders were from overseas and we are just this little place at the bottom of the world in a pandemic.”
Period discs were news to me, but McLean says they won’t be an unusual sight for many – they are particularly popular in the US. “A lot of older people might recognise the concept in that it looks like a diaphragm of days gone by,” she explains. The difference with this design is that it has a loop tab, making the disc more accessible and meaning you don’t need to keep a pair of forceps by the toilet just in case. “The key frustration was that they can be really tricky and slippery to remove without a tab.”
The other major benefit for those who are scared of IUD horror stories is that it is suction free. It also holds an enormous capacity – 50ml, or five tampons’ worth. “We hear from a lot of people who are in workforces like the police, doctors, nurses who are stretched and are busy enough as it is and don’t have time to change a period product every few hours,” McLean says. I am not a policewoman or a doctor, but I do sit on my arse all day and hate to move. I had to try it.
My disc arrived on day three of my period so, to quote Taylor Swift, we were not “out of the woods” yet and everything was still very much “burning red”. I tried to watch the pretty pastel Hello tutorials – which paint a much more polite scene than the bloodshed and self-mutilation these sorts of things usually entail – and then gave it a crack. Having used a menstrual cup for the last few years, I thought I knew what I was doing. Squeeze it, shove it, pop it, lock it, polka dot it (your undies).
McLean tells me that the Hello Disc, which sells online for $49.95 (the same price as the Hello Cup) works for almost everyone with a period. The tab is able to be swivelled and looped in a variety of ways depending on your cervix position, much like a stylish yet versatile internal sarong. “If you’ve got a high cervix you can let the loop drop down into your vaginal canal like a tampon string, but if you’ve got a low cervix you can tuck it,” she explains. And if you’ve got an average cervix you can “flick the loop” inside of itself, meaning it is not too long and not too short – the Goldilocks option.
This is where the confusion starts for me. My understanding is that my cervix has been with me the whole time, but I have chosen not to locate it – kind of like how my mum still doesn’t know how to get to Newmarket even though she has lived in Auckland for 20 years. Every now and then, she just drives around until she somehow ends up there. I went for a chilled out low-cervix option, with the tab hanging out of my body as if I were cosplaying as a large upside-down can of Coke.
“OK, no,” McLean scolds me when I tell her this. “That is the most common rookie error. “It actually has to go up a lot higher than a cup, because you are basically wanting to reach…” she pauses, “the end of the cul-de-sac, essentially.” She says you want to do something of a “three-point turn” with the disc, tucking it behind the pubic bone. Her pro tip for those who are cervically challenged? Next time you are having a smear ask what the position of your cervix is.
What I reveal next to McLean is not something she has ever heard before in her 18 months of product testing the disc. After enjoying a leisurely spa with my disc in, I started going about my day until I heard a “thwack” noise and felt approximately 1.25 litres of water evacuate from the nearest exit. “Yeah, you’re a really tricky one,” she ponders. “You can wear them swimming or in the spa and it shouldn’t take on that much water, so again I’m thinking it is sitting too low.”
Even if I was wearing it too low, stretched between the vaginal walls in the style of James Franco in the poster for 127 Hours, the disc still worked surprisingly well. To up the stakes further, I even put a pair of white underwear on. It’s the working from home era baby, all bets are off. My house, my castle, my horrorshow should everything go horribly wrong. The result was pleasing – nothing but a couple of tiny flecks.
When used correctly, McLean says the period disc is a game-changer – not just because it is sustainable and accessible, but because it also means the wearer can enjoy mess-free period sex. The disc sits very close to the cervix, meaning that penetrative sex can happen without Carrie showing up at prom. It’s something that, after visiting the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective in Wellington, McLean says could be especially useful for sex workers.
“They told us they really don’t want to stop working on their periods, so a lot of them still use sponges, which can be really dangerous as they can harbour bacteria,” she explains. “So the disc has the potential to make a really amazing impact for people like sex workers, so they can continue to work without the period stigma.” When the next batch of Hello Discs are ready, they will be donating a bunch to the NZPC for local sex workers to try out.
“We want to make periods accessible for everyone from sex workers, to people who have reach issues, to people with disabilities,” McLean says. “We want to solve the problem of not just making periods easy and fun, but helping to solve the waste issue caused by single-use period products, while also being a voice and advocate for people with periods, and those who don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
As for me? Well, there’s always next month to nail my three-point turn in the cul-de-sac, if you know what I’m saying.