THE LABEL FILES · Tampons
What's Actually in Your Tampons and Pads
A 2024 study found lead in every tampon brand it tested. There was no law requiring anyone to look.
Tampons and pads touch the most absorptive tissue in the body, for days a month, for decades. And until very recently, no federal law required the people who make them to tell you what is inside. That gap is the whole story. When independent scientists finally tested, they found things no label had ever mentioned, including lead in every single tampon brand they checked.
The legal blind spot
The FDA regulates tampons as Class II medical devices and pads as largely exempt, which means neither was ever covered by the ingredient-labeling laws that apply to shampoo or food. For decades, what was inside was simply not disclosed. New York passed the first state law requiring period-product ingredient labels in 2019, California followed, and the FDA only issued draft guidance recommending disclosure in 2026. The labels you can now read on some boxes exist because lawmakers forced them, not because the industry volunteered.
The metals nobody was testing for
In 2024 a peer-reviewed study measured 30 tampon brands and found lead, arsenic, and cadmium in every one, organic and conventional alike. There is no safe level of lead, and there is no regulatory limit for metals in menstrual products at all. The honest caveat: detecting a metal bound in fiber is not the same as proving it crosses into your body, and the FDA started lab-testing that exact question the same year. Detection is certain. Absorbed dose is the open question, and that it is still open in 2024 is itself the indictment.
The real flags, and the myths
Most of the panic aims at the wrong target. Dioxin from chlorine bleaching was a genuine problem that chlorine-free processing cut to trace levels in the 1990s. The avoidable chemicals today are the ones added on purpose: the deodorant compounds in a scented tampon, the fragrance hiding in an 'unscented' liner under the words 'odor neutralizer.' Scented products test far higher for volatile compounds than unscented. The clean exits are simple and cheap: unscented, chlorine-free, organic cotton, the lowest absorbency that works, or a cup. The problem was never that you needed to panic. It was that you were never allowed to see.
The teardowns
Playtex Sport OdorShield Tampons →
The standard Sport tampon is clean. The 'OdorShield' version adds scent chemicals inside the vaginal canal.
Carefree Original Pantyliners →
An 'odor neutralizer' is fragrance by another name, and it is in liners that never say 'scented.'
Always Maxi Regular Pads with Wings →
Credit for the disclosure. The honest read is that a pad is a plastic product with a pulp core.
Tampax Pearl Tampons →
The transparent one. Most of this list earns a clear, and we say so.
Kotex Click Compact Tampons →
Another clean conventional tampon. The flags here are the category's, not the brand's.
The ingredients, graded
Editorial analysis of publicly listed labels and regulatory/peer-reviewed sources. Not medical advice. Verdicts are evidence-graded, we flag what the data flags and clear what it clears.