Remember growing up watching those period commercials that featured blue liquid in them?

There was always a man dressed in a lab coat pouring blue liquid on a pad to showcase its absorption capacity. As kids, it left quite a lot of us confused - Was it meant to depict pee? Did something blue actually came out during a "period"? Were they actually diaper commercials with no babies in them?

And then we got our periods and suddenly the ads fell into place. But it gave rise to a new question - Why was period blood depicted as blue? Because surely, TV does NOT shy away from showing blood. There's plenty of it actually - even in some cartoons! Well, the blue liquid actually goes back a long way. When period products started advertising, they couldn't show red blood in their commercials. It's because of the heavy stigma attached to menstrual blood - giving it the title of "impure". So they had to select a liquid color apart from red and blue seemed like the most obvious choice to them. Why? Because blue is the color attached to the idea of "clean" and "sanitary". Think how most cleaning products are blue! And what better way to depict their product as "sanitary" if not blue, right? WRONG.

Because we don't bleed blue. And periods are perfectly, totally, absolutely normal and NOT dirty. So, isn't it high time that showing them should be normalized too?