Period Emojis Could Be Coming Soon To Help You Accurately Vent About Your PMS
Silver linings are few and far between when it comes to your period.
One of those rare pleasures is the right to complain about it incessantly.
You're in a bad mood! Your skin is breaking out! Your stomach is in knots! You can't stop farting! You can't stop crying to random puppy videos on your news feed! Your panties look like there was just a murder inside of them! This tampon is so freaking uncomfortable!
You get the picture here. There's plenty to vent about. And lucky for you, children's organization, Plan International, has decided to give us a new, innovative way to talk about it.
Yep, that's right. PERIOD-THEMED EMOJIS COMIN' AT YA IN NO TIME.
Plan International has come up with a winged pad, a red and pink uterus, a blood-stained pair of panties, a calendar with blood drops, and a pill box covered with smiling and frowning blood drops.
Supporters can vote for their favorite emoji online until June 2, 2017, and the winning emoji will be presented to the Unicode Consortium (AKA Emoji HQ) in 2018.
Aside from being a newfound means of talking about your period with your friends, your mom, your dad, your boyfriend, and literally anyone on the face of the Earth willing to listen, these period emojis actually have a great purpose behind them.
The period-themed emojis are aiming to break down the stigma that comes along with menstruation, which affects females all over the world.
On the off chance you're sitting there wondering, "What stigma?" allow me to break it down for you.
According to Glamour, a survey by a period-tracking app called Clue looked into just how real period stigma really is. The app found that 14 percent of its users were uncomfortable talking to other women about their periods. A shockingly large 66 percent of them were uncomfortable talking about it with men.
It's shocking that people feel this uncomfortable talking about it, when 17 percent of these same women have had periods so terrible that they missed school or work as a result of it.
Through the period emojis, Plan International hopes to give women a new, more comfortable means of talking about their periods.
"Even though at least 800 million women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 are menstruating right now, there isn't a single emoji to represent periods," Susanne Legena, Deputy CEO for Plan International in Australia, told Mashable. "Isn't it ridiculous that there's a long-nose goblin emoji and a floppy disc emoji, but no period emoji?"
Time to make that change and BRING ON THE PERIOD EMOJIS.
Citations: How This Period Emoji Campaign Could Start a Worldwide Conversation (Glamour)
