Except for medicine, there is no greater target market for alternative hucksters than cosmetics. A dozen non-profits have appeared claiming that chemicals are harming women, without disclosing that the levels of chemicals that can be considered harmful are in defiance of what Paracelsus noted about the dose making a chemical a poison versus a benefit. They are at trace levels, you have to believe in homeopathy, or its 1990s re-brand as endocrine disruption, to believe it is magically bio-accumulating you and harming you while cancer rates continue to go down.

But if you buy organic food and believe in psychics, a menstrual mask face mask is probably solid science to you. Anyway, I like the DIY biology community, even if I don't trust everything they try to do to themselves, and women making masks from their own menstrual blood is fine - they are not selling this nonsense. So if you make a face mask out of menstrual blood and you think it is helping your skin, okay, I am not judge-y outside people and companies who either scare others for power or try to monetize fear. Jessica Yarbrough is doing neither of those but what she does is just weird enough that she pitched it to an editor and they liked it.

I'd have taken it too. Sometimes you have to throw stuff out there and get people talking.

I'd have been right, just like they are. She is downright inspired, even as her disbelief is evident: "The Dazed instructions said to leave it on for 15-20 minutes, during which time I channeled the divine feminine energy within, snapped bloody-faced selfies like Kim K getting a vampire facial, and only sort of questioned my sanity."


Jessica Yarbrough . Image courtesy of  Jessica Yarbrough

Give it a read, and if you do try it at home despite her telling you repeatedly not to try it at home, please let us know.