Cardi B’s Period-Stopping Cocktail Wouldn’t Be Worth the Stomach Ache

I trust Cardi B more than I trust most other celebrities, because she spent enough time out of the spotlight to experience the common people’s health issues. I simply do not have Gwyneth Paltrow problems—I have never wondered how to become a Super Attractor and Manifest the Life I Want or what the nine crystals I should keep by my desk might be. But I know for a fact that I’ve frantically Googled how to stop or pause a period (for a variety of reasons we don’t need to get into) and I am not surprised to learn that Cardi has, too.

The rapper shared a quick anecdote on radio personality Angie Martinez’s WEtv show Untold Stories of Hip Hop about the first time she slept with her future husband Offset centered around an appalling home remedy that I definitely would have tried in high school. “This is the beginning of the stage of my relationship with this guy, I’m trying to impress him, and then I got my period,” she told Martinez. “I was like damn… I don’t wanna leave him dry.” Cardi’s solution: “I drank two ibuprofens and I drank gelatin, and that stopped my period.”

It’s not a solution she pulled out of thin air, either. Although there is some medical basis for the period-delaying potential of ibuprofen and other NSAIDs like Advil and Motrin due to their anti-inflammatory effect, doctors only recommend them for lightening a heavy period, not halting one entirely; the Cleveland Clinic notes that the amount of ibuprofen that would be needed to stop a period would be well above the recommended dose. Gelatin, on the other hand is one of many “home remedies” that can be found online, unsupported by any scientific evidence at all. According to doctors, overdoing it can lead to “bloating and digestive stress.” Other unsupported methods pushed by quack websites: exercise, masturbation, sex, vinegar, raspberry tea, and “cooking in a cast-iron skillet.”

If you are looking to delay a period, there are prescription medications and birth control options that might do the trick. But maybe the best thing to do is to normalize periods by just going ahead and grabbing a towel and making some “bloody moves.”

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