For the past two years, the 29-year-old dancer from Ohio had been battling severe pelvic pain and vaginal odor. “It was like 8/10, terrible core pain,” she says. “I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t even do office work. It was bad.”
When she went to the doctors, she told them what she thought was the cause: an allergic reaction to soy oil in a vat of water in which she swam during a pirate-themed dinner theater performance. But they did not believe him. “They tried to treat it with antibiotics,” she says, “and they did nothing.”
So Farrah (who requested that we withhold her full name to speak openly about health matters) started Googling her symptoms. That’s how she noticed Nuve, a vaginal health company that offers supplements, suppositories, and at-home vaginal microbiome testing kits.
She ordered a test from the company for $150, and it came back with the diagnosis: aerobic vaginitis (AV), a bacterial infection caused by overgrowth of E. coli or streptococcus. She ordered the supplements recommended by the company, and she says the pain subsided almost immediately. “I was actually very happy to find out what was wrong,” she says.
Farah is one of a growing number of women who have used home tests to self-diagnose problems with the vaginal microbiome – an ecosystem of bacteria that grows inside the vagina; According to several studies, the presence of “good” bacteria is related to a lower risk of STIs and other types of infections. The industry was shocked when Silicon Valley entrepreneur Brian Johnson recently posted on X that he had just given oral sex to his girlfriend Kate Tolo and then released a screengrab of her TinyHealth vaginal microbiome report. They announced that she scored “100/100” and was in the “top 1% of all vaginas” due to dominance. lactobacillus crispatusA type of “good” bacteria found in the vagina.
Johnson’s thread was widely mocked, with many questioning why Johnson would publicly measure his partner’s vaginal health in this manner. But it also received responses online from women who are tracking their vaginal microbiomes to treat their bacterial infections, to boost fertility, or just for interest’s sake. Some even posted their results.
The market for at-home vaginal microbiome tests is growing — TinyHealth, the startup used by Tolo, claims vaginal health test sales increased 2,000 percent within the first 48 hours of Johnson’s post — and similar companies include Juno Bio, which partners with Nuve; UK-based Day, and AV. But some experts believe there is not enough research yet to support the long-term validity of such tests. None of the home kits available on the market are FDA approved. There are also questions about whether they empower women to take their health care into their own hands or simply create more anxiety for them.
Twenty-eight-year-old Samantha (she also requested a pseudonym given the sensitive nature of this topic) developed an interest in vaginal microbiome testing after experiencing bacterial vaginosis, or BV. She ordered a test kit from AV on the recommendation of the Facebook group Beyond BV, which provides support for women with frequent vaginal infections, and where they often post their own results.
Samantha found her test results useful, but she also noticed a distinct strain of paranoia within the group. For example, when many women receive their results, they focus on whether they have enough. lactobacillus crispatusOr “good” bacteria in the vagina. “I’ll read posts where women panic when they get 97 percent crispertus and then they’ll test again and get 60 percent results and they’ll be really frustrated and scared,” she says. The opposite is also true. “Women will post about being 100 percent Crispatus and other women will just say in the comments something like, ‘Oh, I’m so jealous, I’m facing so many problems, I hope one day I can be like you.'”
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