Period pants failed me once. So this time I gave them the worst five days of my month.

Gemma, 34, has a heavy period, two small children and zero patience for products that don't work. Two years ago period pants let her down badly and she swore off them for good.

Then one brand wore her down. She kept a diary for one full cycle. It didn't go how she expected.

Let me describe my period to you, so we're all on the same page.

Days one and two: crime scene. Day three: suspicious. Days four and five: mostly admin. It's been like this since I was fourteen, and in twenty years I've built an entire security system around it. Dark jeans only. A spare pad in every handbag, every coat pocket, and one in the glovebox that has been there so long it's technically a fossil. And the maths. Always the maths. How long has it been, how long is this meeting, and can I get to the loo without taking my entire handbag and announcing my situation to the whole office.

So no, I was not the target audience for period pants. Actually, that's not true. I was, once. Two years ago I bought a cheap multipack off the internet, wore them to work feeling very smug and modern, and by lunchtime I was sitting in a meeting feeling like I'd wet myself. Damp. There's no nicer word for it. Then on the second night they leaked at the front, because the absorbent bit stopped halfway up and I sleep face down like I've been dropped from a height. I washed my pyjamas at 6am, went back to pads, and filed period pants under products for women with polite periods.

Mine is not polite.

Which brings us to this year, when Lunã started following me around the internet. Instagram first. Then the mums' group chat, of all places, where Kirsty (three kids, endometriosis, trusts nothing and no one) said hers had survived a caravan holiday in Wales. I went to read the reviews purely to feel superior, and instead found pages of women with heavy flows saying theirs held. Fine. FINE. Two things tipped me over the edge.

One, there's a fit guarantee, so you can exchange them even after wearing them, which makes the risk basically zero. Two, they run a buy 1 get 1 free deal, so I could order enough pairs to test a full cycle without remortgaging. I got the brief for my heavy days and the seamless hipster for the lighter ones, and told my husband I was doing an experiment. He looked worried. Good.

My period, which has a sense of humour, started the night before my longest office day. Perfect. If we're doing this, we're doing it properly.

First surprise, before I'd even left the bedroom: the brief is nice. Bamboo, with a cotton lining on the inside, which was the first thing I checked, because the cheap pair from two years ago felt like sitting on a bin liner. I was braced for something between a nappy and a wetsuit. These are softer than my actual underwear, which I found genuinely annoying.

I nearly wore a pad in them as backup. I want to be honest about that. I stood in the bathroom holding it like a security blanket before deciding backup was cheating, packing a spare pair and a little zip bag into my handbag, and doing the maths all the way into Manchester anyway. Twenty years of habit doesn't die on a Tuesday.

By 11am the paranoia won and I went to check. I'd like to describe that moment properly, because I stood in the cubicle for a solid thirty seconds trying to understand it. Dry. Not dry-ish. Not fine, considering. Dry to the touch. On my heaviest day, four hours in. I checked twice. I may have said WHAT out loud, alone, in a toilet cubicle, like a mad woman.

I changed into the fresh pair around three, roughly eight hours in, and was back at my desk faster than any pad change of my life. Also, and I can't overstate this: no wrapper. No rustling. Anyone who has ever tried to open a pad silently in a dead quiet office toilet, with the concentration of a bomb disposal expert, knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Right. The stomach sleeping test. This is exactly where the old pair died, and I fully expected these to die the same death.

I've never once managed to sleep on my back. I've tried. I always wake up face down, starfished, as if placed there by a crane. During my period this has always meant one thing: the 6am pyjama inspection. And every so often, stripping a bed before coffee. Silently. Furiously. While the rest of the house sleeps on.

Alfie, who is three, woke me at ten past six by shouting something urgent about a dinosaur. I did the inspection on autopilot. Nothing. Pants: nothing. Pyjamas: nothing. Sheets: nothing. I actually switched the bedside lamp on to investigate, and that's when I found the reason. The absorbent layer doesn't stop halfway like my old pair did. It runs the entire way, front to back, right up into the waistband. The exact spot where the old ones surrendered.

I'm not saying I got emotional about a pair of pants at six in the morning. I'm saying I explained them to Dan over coffee, unprompted, with gestures. He said that's great, love. He has no idea. HE HAS NO IDEA.

Second heavy day, working from home, so lower stakes. Same rhythm: one pair until mid afternoon, fresh pair after. And the first wash, which I'd built up in my head into some sort of Victorian laundry scene. The reality: rinse under the cold tap until the water runs clear, chuck them in with the normal wash, hang them up. Two minutes. Freya's school socks are more work.

But day two is when I noticed the thing. Or rather, stopped noticing it.

Can we talk about the smell? Because nobody else will. With pads, by the end of the day, there is a smell. Every woman knows it, no woman mentions it, and I've spent two decades quietly paranoid about it in lifts, meeting rooms and soft play centres. On day two I realised it simply wasn't there. Not fainter. Gone. Apparently it's the blood sitting on the surface of a plastic pad that causes it, and these pull everything away from the skin instead. I don't need the science. I need to tell every woman I've ever met.

Day three, costume change: the seamless hipster, bought for my lighter days. A completely different animal to the brief. Smooth, stretchy, vaguely sporty. If the brief is your favourite cosy pyjamas, the hipster is your good gym leggings. No seams, so no lines, which I tested under my most unforgiving work trousers with a level of mirror checking I haven't done since about 2013.

These go up to twelve hours on lighter days. So: school run, full day of work, Freya's swimming lesson on that poolside bench (you know the bench, it's somehow always wet AND you leave sweating), dinner, then bedtime negotiations with a three year old who argues like a lawyer. I changed once, before bed. On day five, one pair did the entire day.

And somewhere in the middle of day four, the strangest thing of the whole week happened. Nothing. At about 9pm I realised I hadn't thought about my period once that day. Not once. If you have a heavy flow, you'll understand how insane that sentence is. My brain runs a permanent background app during my period: monitoring, calculating, planning bathroom access like a heist. Between the job, two kids, and remembering World Book Day exists before 8:47 on the actual morning, I don't have spare headspace. And that app just quietly closed itself.

Nobody puts that on the packaging. And it's the entire point.

Am I converted? Annoyingly, completely.

The honest scorecard, because I promised one. What won me over: dry in a way I'd refused to believe was possible, five nights face down with zero incidents, the smell simply gone, and the quiet in my head, which I'd have paid double for on its own. What I'd flag: they air dry, so with a heavy flow you want enough pairs to rotate, and I wish I'd ordered one extra brief, because my wash timing on days one and two got a bit Formula 1. I'm adding one to my next order.

And yes, upfront they cost more than a pack of pads. Then I did the maths I actually enjoy doing. Twenty years of buying pads every single month, versus pants I wash and reuse for years. The buy one get one free deal made it a non-decision, and I haven't bought a pad since.

Twenty years of dark jeans, fossilised glovebox pads and toilet cubicle maths, and it turns out the fix was a decent pair of pants. I'm not thrilled about how simple that is. But if your period is heavy and you've been burned by a cheap pair before, that was me exactly, and I'll tell you what Kirsty and several hundred reviews told me: these are not that.

The old pair is in the bin. The maths app is uninstalled. And Dan is still hearing about the waistband.

Gemma tested the heavy flow brief and the seamless hipster from Lunã's UK range. She paid for them herself using the bundle deal.

This article reflects one reader's personal experience over a single cycle. Experiences vary from person to person.

Women's Health Guide may earn a commission on purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you.

© 2026 Women's Health Guide. Advertising disclosure: this page contains commercial links to lunasperiod.co.uk.