We are 1.8 billion people on this planet menstruating, on average within 450 cycles a lifetime, ~30-80ml menstrual effluent shed per cycle. Menstruation is a an information-rich essential process of the female body, but what did we do the past hundreds of years?
We have treated this healthy, bodily process as something to conceal as quickly as possible. Because of the huge menstrual stigma and the general neglect of female bodies within medical research we are now facing a huge gender data gap.
If we’d put all the effort in menstrual blood research instead of concealing MB, we could have already closed a big part of the gender data gap. Why? Because menstrual blood could be used as a non-invasive, at-home monthly self check-up. But we’ve ignored this tremendous potential and instead we’re trying to cover up menstruation with blue flowers and pleasant smells.
So the question I started with was simple: what would the world look like if we finally acknowledged and treated menstrual blood as the valuable resource it already is?My project, Cuora, is a speculative femtech brand built around one vision: a world where menstruation is not stigmatised, but finally valued as an essential process of the female body. And the more I researched, the more I realised this world is far less speculative than I thought. Because menstrual blood is not waste. It is a diagnostic resource.
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