3 Men Created ‘Pinky Gloves’ For Disposing Of Tampons And Women’s Eyes Everywhere Are Rolling

While the Western world has come a long way in normalizing women’s bodies and our bodily processes, there’s still a major stigma around menstruation. It’s seen as “gross,” something to be hidden away. God forbid you open a pad in a public bathroom and another woman – who likely also has a period, I should mention – hears the packaging! Sadly, men are largely behind the shame we feel about our bodies and that was only made worse after three German dudes decided to invent Pinky Gloves – disposable pink gloves used to retrieve tampons so you don’t have to get your hands dirty.

  1. For one thing, not all women love pink. Only a man could think that a woman’s female hygiene product needs to be pink to be appealing. Wrong, buddy – it could be jet black and I still wouldn’t buy it because it’s ridiculous. They’ve trivialized their own product before it even gets half a chance in many women’s minds for this reason alone.
  2. Second of all, it’s absolutely ridiculous. The idea that Pinky Gloves is something that’s necessary – that we as women who already spend way too much money on taxable feminine hygiene products every single month for 30 or 40 years of our lives on average need to add an additional expense of pink latex gloves to retrieve a tampon – is nuts. Somehow, millions of women for several thousand years have managed to go through our periods without these things. We’ve never needed them and we don’t need them now.
  3. It reinforces the stigma around periods. The biggest problem here, aside from this being just a silly product that was (of course) invented by men without vaginas or periods is the message Pinky Gloves is sending. It’s telling women that their menstrual blood, which is totally natural, is something so icky that they need to be protected from it at all costs. Newsflash, Men: if you happen to get blood on your hands, it’s called soap and a sink. Not that hard.
  4. Oddly enough, a lot of people thought this was a good idea. The three guys behind Pinky Gloves had no trouble raising cash to get their brand off the ground. They went on the German version of Shark Tank called Die Höhle der Löwen to pitch their idea and easily secured €30,000 for the business, which hinges on selling packs of 48 gloves for €11.96 ($14.50).
  5. They’ve since apologized and have halted sales of the product. After the serious backlash to their company, Pinky Gloves issued an apology online and ceased sales of the product temporarily. “At no point did we intend to discredit anyone or make a natural process taboo. The development of our product and the communication with it was not well thought out. People make mistakes – and you have to deal with mistakes, you have to learn from them and you should also be given the chance to work on mistakes,” they said in a statement posted to their website. They added that they’d since taken the product off the market and are no longer purchasing materials or selling the stock they have. “We apologize to everyone whose feelings and emotions have been hurt. We can understand that so many are upset about it. We continue to welcome the fact that an important debate has started, where the objective and constructive culture of debate will hopefully regain the upper hand,” they added.

Jennifer Still is a writer and editor with more than 10 years of experience. The managing editor of Bolde, she has bylines in Vanity Fair, Business Insider, The New York Times, Glamour, Bon Appetit, and many more. You can follow her on Twitter @jenniferlstill
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