Britain’s DAME eco-friendly tampons have generated plenty of holiday spirit on London buses with the message ‘Bleed Red. Think Green.’ Perfect! There’s nothing better than a Dame who knows what she’s doing. Note that this DAME ships to the US and throughout Europe.

“Tampons and period products have been hidden in the shadows for too long,” DAME co-founder Celia Pool tells Dazed. “Still today, major brands boast on their boxes about silent wrappers. Why? There's no shame in rustling a tampon wrapper in the next door cubicle. Periods are not shameful.”

Even though DAME has an excellent reputation in Britain with strong sustainability and product integrity credentials, launching the campaign was not easy. Veterinary nurse, law student and vegan beauty blogger Demi Colleen photographed herself standing in her underwear with a visible tampon string hanging down. Scandalous!

“We faced many roadblocks,” explains co-founder Alec Mills who says he was told that the ad was too ‘racy’ and would encounter problems broadcasting it on breakfast shows. “Many iterations of our advert got rejected. This clearly demonstrates the vast cultural chasm between what is happening with women’s bodies and how they are portrayed in reality.”

“This tampon string on the side of the bus is momentous, in that it hasn't happened before, but it's also utterly boring and normal. No one bats an eyelid when they see a tissue on the side of the bus, and it should be the same for a tampon string,” says Pool. “If every parent and carer were this cool about periods, period shame would be eradicated in one generation.”

DAME in the News

Award-Winning Brand DAME Is Changing The Face Of The Femcare Industry - One Tampon At A Time Forbes

The Founders of Dame on How They’ve Shaken Up the Feminine Care Industry Pop Sugar UK

Celia Pool and Alec Mills, founders of DAME period products and delivery.

DAME Is First Period Brand to Be Climate Positive | Fish Rejoice AOC Women

Most young entrepreneurs struggle to be taken seriously by potential investors. Imagine having raised capital from investors to support DAME, a subscription service delivery a range of London high street period products to women living in the UK, and returning to investors with an ethical problem is epic proportions in the business model. In one word: sustainability. .

“Pivoting the business was a real challenge,” co-founder Celia Pool recalled for Forbes. “Having to go to our investors and say that we no longer believed in the synthetic single-use products that we were selling, and we wanted to design our own was a big thing.

“We had a lot to prove,” Pool continued, explaining how she and business partner Alec Mills, brought their new sustainable tampon and applicator to market in early 2019.

Dazed Digital shares another major milestone development in DAME’s road to success.

Let’s ground ourselves in facts.

Tampons and sanitary pads are estimated to produce over 100 billion pieces of waste every year and they are the fifth-most common type of waste washing up on beaches, with nine plastic tampon applicators found per kilometre on UK beaches according to the Women’s Environmental Network. With the average woman using around 12,000 tampons in her life, each of them contributes 24,000 pieces of plastic to landfill, as most applicators have two plastic parts.

That is one sobering paragraph for ALL women who have a degree of choice in our lives — and that includes menopausal women with granddaughters. We all have obligations to saving our planet, but this is one subject all women can relate to.