Those of us with wombs will know that tampons can come in pretty handy once a month when Flo cometh to town.

But, curiously, new figures show that women in the UK are buying five million fewer packets of tampons each year.

Research from market research firm, Kantar Worldpanel, shows that 23.2 million packets of tampons were sold in the year ending October 2016, compared with 29.4 million in the year ending October 2012.

It seems that these statistics do not come from a change in sanitary product preference, as the statistics also revealed a million fewer packets of sanitary towels were sold last year, compared with 2012. Additionally, sales of all sanitary products in the UK 2012 amounted to £236 million, compared with £221 million in 2016, with tampon sales seeing a drop of almost a quarter.

Tampon sales in the UK have plummeted dramatically, but why?