5 Things About The Plastic In Your Underwear
We're Sorry In Advance: 5 Things About The Plastic In Your Underwear You Can't Unknow.
Our underwear is 92% bamboo. Reading this might ruin the synthetic stuff sitting in your drawer right now, and for that, we are genuinely sorry.
Six months ago we did something that probably looked insane: we shut our own brand down. Not because we ran out of money, because we read what's actually inside most underwear, including ours. Here are the five things we found. Fair warning: you can't unsee them.
Most of your underwear is plastic.
The industry standard is 20 to 30% polyester, nylon or elastane. Plastic, basically, woven into the one thing you wear closest to your body for around 16 hours a day. If your underwear ever feels damp, clingy or just off by 3pm, that's the synthetic fabric, not you.
It sits on some of the most absorbent skin you have.
The skin around the vulva is delicate and highly absorbent, closer to a membrane than the skin on your arm. Whatever your underwear is made of, it's in warm, close, constant contact with it all day.
Microplastics don't stay in the fabric.
Synthetic clothing sheds microplastics with every wash and wear, and researchers have now found microplastics in human blood and tissue. We're not claiming your underwear is the cause. We're saying no one can promise it isn't part of it.
Warm + synthetic + moisture is a recipe your body doesn't love.
Synthetics trap heat and moisture instead of breathing. For a lot of people that means more odour, irritation and that not-fresh feeling, especially on your period. If you've ever changed twice a day just to feel clean, it might be the fabric, not you.
Even 'good' period underwear often hides a plastic gusset.
Plenty of period brands quietly use a synthetic, coated leak layer and never mention it. We built ours as a thin multi-layer leak-proof gusset, and we'll tell you exactly what's in every layer.
So we rebuilt it from the fibre up.
Three years and hundreds of failed samples later, Rudie came back. A body that's 92% bamboo viscose, up to 70% less synthetic than the standard, seamless, OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified, with a multi-layer leak-proof gusset. We kept 8% elastane, because without it underwear bags out by lunch, and we'll always be honest about that 8%.
Meet the range
What people are saying
"I genuinely forget I'm wearing them. And knowing it's actually bamboo, not plastic, I'm not going back."
"Finally a period brand that just tells you the truth about what it's made of."