9 Vagina Trends We’d Like to Leave Behind in 2017

Sipping these herbal or fruit teas is said to make your “yoni”—Sanskrit for “womb” or “uterus”—smell nice. Some spas upped the ante and offered steams using similar ingredients to “detox” the vaginal canal. Health’s medical editor, Roshini Rajapaksa, MD, found a lot at fault with yoni teas, including the fact that a simple rinse with water of your outer genitals is all you need to keep your vagina and vulva clean. More importantly, Dr. Raj wrote in November, “inserting herbs or hot liquids or even exposing your genitals to steam for a prolonged period could irritate or burn the sensitive tissues or disrupt the healthy flora that reside in your vagina. Just let your V be!”

We’re pretty pro-cucumbers in general, but we were shocked to hear about this one. “Apparently some women are peeling cucumbers, inserting them vaginally, and then twisting them around for up to 20 minutes to refresh or cleanse or flush or something,” gynecologist and pain medicine physician Jen Gunter, MD, wrote in October. “If you have a vagina you should definitely not do this.”

You don’t need to clean your vagina with anything, let alone a cucumber—which, Dr. Gunter points out, isn’t clean to begin with. “Cucumbers seem prone to all kinds of nasty fungi, and I just don’t think anything capable of getting blossom end rot should go in a vagina.”

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Babies are first exposed to bacteria during birth; getting naturally coated in vaginal secretions as they’re delivered actually primes their immune systems. So it’s understandable that new moms who deliver via C-section want to give their newborns similar protection.

But swabbing your bundle of joy with your fluids (dubbed vaginal seeding) doesn’t exactly scream, “Welcome to the world!” and it could actually be dangerous. “It’s an interesting concept, but there are no studies on it,“ Michael Cackovic, MD, ob-gyn at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center told Health in August. In the process of seeding, you could actually transfer infections to your baby, even if you don’t have any symptoms. “A lot of women have viral shedding of genital herpes in their vagina," Dr. Cackovic said. "That’s something that can be life-threatening to a baby."

Prevent dark spots, renew and improve skin, look glowy and fresh. Down there. Seriously.

When we got wind of the Very V Luminizer, a highlighter for your vulva, we were not impressed. The manufacturer swears the cream is empowering: “We mean to communicate a feeling—not a specific look,” CEO Avonda Urben wrote in an email to Health in July. “Every woman’s V is perfect and she should feel great about it.”

But Dr. Gunter was not convinced. "Insinuating that vulvas need extra prettiness is not a very empowering message. At all," she wrote in a blog post on her site Wielding the Lasso of Truth. Plus, she added in an email to Health, skin-lightening ingredients could cause irritation or allergic reactions on that delicate skin.

In July, Passion Dust Intimacy Capsules provided a solution to a problem no one was having. The capsules are meant to be inserted into the vagina before sex; as they dissolve, they release glitter and presumably sugar, “creating a sparkly, flavored orgasm."

The manufacturer promises the glitter is edible and safe, but Dr. Gunter was concerned bedroom glitterbombs could result in infection. “The idea that just because you can eat something, it’s safe for your vagina, just isn’t correct,” she told Health. In fact, she warned, the glitter and other ingredients could be irritating down there, or even trigger an infection.

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We get it, yeast infections are common, frustrating, and always seem to pop up when you don’t have a second to spare to run to the pharmacy or to your ob-gyn. But resorting to home remedies with no scientific backing isn’t the answer. When a friend tried this approach at home in July—and the garlic sprouted inside her­­—we asked ob-gyn Lauren Streicher, MD, associate clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University and author of Sex Rx: Hormones, Health and Your Best Sex Ever, if it could offer any relief. "It's ridiculous," she said. "[Garlic] isn't something that any gynecologist would ever recommend.”

It’s no substitute for OTC or prescription antifungal meds. And if those don’t work, talk to your doc, Dr. Streicher said. It’s possible you might be blaming your symptoms on yeast when a different infection is really to blame (and might require different treatment).

You’d think this would sound painful enough for most women to stay far, far away, but inserting a type of wasp nest called oak galls into the vaginas to firm and tighten up became a thing last spring. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this can allegedly sting and burn. “Here’s a pro-tip, if something burns when you apply it to the vagina it is generally bad for the vagina,” Dr. Gunter wrote in a blog post in June. Oak galls act as an astringent—which means you'll be drier than usual below the belt. (Ouch!) Dr. Gunter found oak galls for sale on Etsy, of all places; thankfully, the retailer has since taken the product down.

Khloé Kardashian recommended using down-there wipes “to show your v-jay some TLC to keep her healthy and happy” back in March. Her faves were flushable, safe for sensitive skin, and pleasingly lavender-scented—but (noticing a pattern here?) you don’t need to clean your vagina. Even your vulva does just fine with a simple rinse.

If you are getting a whiff of a funky smell, Dr. Streicher told Health, "you can wipe as much as you want, but that's not going to change what's happening inside the body.” Depending on your skin, wipes could cause irritation and itchiness. "Your vulva and vagina are a self-cleaning oven, and perpetuating this idea of additional cleaning is harmful and frankly the opposite of empowering," Dr. Gunter told Health in an email. "To say this means you think the area is 'dirty.' It's not."

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Perhaps 2017’s nuttiest vagina trend was the jade egg, Gwyneth Paltrow’s $66 rock for better sex. When her lifestyle website Goop published a story in January claiming the eggs could cleanse, strengthen, and tighten vaginas, the eggs sold out—but gynecologists were skeptical at best. Dr. Gunter wondered how it would be cleaned and worried that porous jade could harbor bacteria. Dr. Streicher warned that slippery jade eggs could be hard to retrieve from the vaginal canal and lead to scratching as you desperately try to grab hold.

Goop recommended leaving the eggs in place for hours at a time—which both ob-gyns said won’t strengthen pelvic floor muscles. “You want to contract and relax, not have [your muscles] contract continually,” Dr. Gunter told Health. “Many people have this idea that if it’s natural it must be good, useful, and not harmful,” Dr. Streicher said about jade. “To which I always say, arsenic is natural, but that’s certainly harmful."