A tampon is summer time’s MVP once you need to get pleasure from a dip within the pool whereas in your interval: You don’t have to fret about any form of blood-in-the-water scenario or take care of a sopping-wet pad.

However the identical factor that makes a tampon so useful—its absorbency—can pose a possible threat after you get out of the water. “Simply as interval blood can wick right down to the surface of a tampon, water can wick up into the vagina [when you’re swimming],” Mary Jane Minkin, MD, a board-certified ob-gyn and scientific professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at Yale College of Medication, tells SELF.

In the event you’re not somewhat cautious, this additional moisture may cause some bother on your vagina. Right here’s why it’s tremendous necessary to alter your tampon after you’re taking a dip within the pool, float down a river, or plunge into these ocean waves, based on ob-gyns.

It isn’t an ideal concept to depart something moist hanging round your vulva.

Having a tampon in your vagina—whether or not you’re swimming or not—creates the best setting for microorganisms like micro organism to multiply: It will get moist whereas absorbing interval blood (and different vaginal secretions) and your physique temperature makes it heat. All of that is superb assuming you’re altering your tampon each 4 to eight hours. However once you go away it in longer than that, you elevate your threat of irritation or an infection, in addition to a uncommon (however critical) situation referred to as poisonous shock syndrome, the place micro organism launch toxins into the bloodstream.

Going for a dip within the pool, even for a brief burst, solely boosts how moist (sorry) issues are down there. Water absorbed by way of each the outermost base of the tampon and the string creates an setting that stays damp post-swim, Kenosha D. Gleaton, MD, a board-certified ob-gyn in Charleston, South Carolina, and medical advisor for the perinatal well being model Natalist, tells SELF. That additional moisture primes the world for micro organism and yeast to thrive, which additionally ups your probabilities of irritation or an infection. That’s why Dr. Gleaton all the time suggests you modify your tampon (and ideally out of your moist swimsuit, too) inside an hour of swimming.

With regards to any of those dangers, “it’s actually one thing already in the individual and never one thing being transferred from pathogens within the water that we’re involved about,” Dr. Minkin explains. (Merely put, the moist tampon units up an excellent alternative for the microorganisms you’re already internet hosting to multiply.)

That stated, water shifting up into the vagina by way of a moist tampon can additionally carry some not-so-great hitchhikers, Dr. Gleaton provides, like different forms of micro organism, salt, or chlorine, relying on whether or not you’re swimming in a lake, ocean, or pool, respectively. And since your vagina is absorbent, you possibly can theoretically absorb a few of that stuff (notably for those who’re chillin’ with the moist tampon in for some time), which can trigger a rash or irritation down there, Dr. Gleaton says. The excellent news is, there’s no stable analysis to recommend {that a} moist tampon from, say, a dip within the ocean is any extra dangerous than one from every other physique of water, or vice versa, Dr. Minkin says.