Jessica Wynn

Discharge is part of how the vaginal microbiome maintains itself.

It changes throughout a woman's cycle.

It's not dirty.

It's information.

And so if something smells sharply fishy or you have itching or burning, that's when you see a doctor, not a steam spa.

The vaginal microbiome is one of the most finely tuned ecosystems on Earth.

What's happening there is the role of lactobacillus.

So it does get affected by antibiotics, by what you eat, sex and hormones, which is why overcleansing can backfire.

If you use mouthwash 50 times a day, it just nukes everything and then bad stuff moves in.

Yeah.

I mean, it's the same thing when you're douching your vagina.

You're you're cleaning out all the good stuff and the bad stuff moves in.

And people are just convinced that vaginas are inherently wrong.

In the 1920s, Lysol, the household cleaner, was marketed as a vaginal douche.

The thing people would clean their toilets with.

Yeah.

The ads suggested that women who didn't douche were failing their husbands.

Absolutely.

But the ads kept running because shame sells.

And that's still the playbook.