Farrah was fed up with her vagina.
For the past two years, the 29-year-old dancer from Ohio had been dealing with severe pelvic pain and vaginal odor. “It was like 8/10, horrible core pain,” she says. “I couldn’t lie down. I couldn’t even work an office job. It was bad.”
When she visited doctors, she told them what she thought the culprit was: an allergic reaction to soy oil in a vat of water she’d swam in during a pirate-themed dinner theater performance. But they didn’t believe her. “They attempted to fix it with antibiotics,” she says. “And they just did nothing.”
So Farrah (who requested we withhold her full name to speak freely about health matters) started Googling her symptoms. That’s how she stumbled on Neueve, a vaginal health company that provides supplements, suppositories, and at-home vaginal microbiome testing kits.
She ordered a test from the company for $150, and it came back with a diagnosis: aerobic vaginitis (AV), a bacterial infection caused by an overgrowth of E. coli or streptococcus. She ordered supplements the company recommended, and she says the pain abated almost immediately. “I was just so glad to actually know what was wrong,” she says.
Farrah is one of a growing number of women who have used at-home tests to self-diagnose issues with the vaginal microbiome—an ecosystem of bacteria growing inside the vagina; the presence of “good” bacteria correlates with lower risk of STIs and other types of infections, according to numerous studies. The industry got a shoutout when the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bryan Johnson recently posted on X that he had just given oral sex to his girlfriend, Kate Tolo, then followed up with a screengrab of her TinyHealth vaginal microbiome report. He proclaimed that she scored “100/100” and that hers was in the “top 1% of all vaginas” due to the dominance of Lactobacillus crispatus, a type of “good” bacteria found in the vagina.
Johnson’s thread garnered widespread mockery, with many questioning why Johnson would publicly quantify his partner’s vaginal health in such a fashion. But it also received replies from women online who are tracking their own vaginal microbiomes to treat their bacterial infections, to boost fertility, or just out of interest. Some even posted their results.
The market for at-home vaginal microbiome tests is growing—TinyHealth, the startup Tolo used, claims vaginal health testing sales spiked 2,000 percent within the first 48 hours of Johnson’s post—and similar companies include Juno Bio, which partners with Neueve; the UK-based Daye, and Evvy. But some experts believe there’s not yet enough research to support the long-term validity of such tests. None of the at-home kits on the market are approved by the FDA. There are also questions as to 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 a bout of bacterial vaginosis, or BV. She ordered a testing kit from Evvy upon the recommendation of the Facebook group Beyond BV, which offers support for women with recurring 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 instance, when many women receive their results, they tend to focus on whether they have enough Lactobacillus crispatus, or “good” bacteria, in the vagina. “I’ll read posts where women are freaking out if they have like 97 percent crispatus and then they’ll retest and they’ll have like 60 percent and be really disappointed and scared,” she says. The opposite also holds true. “Women will post about having 100 percent crispatus and other women in the comments will just be like, ‘Oh, I’m so jealous, I’m having so many issues, I hope to be you one day.’”