Okay so I posted a #getreadywithme where I mentioned, completely in passing, that I’ve worn a thong every single day for like four years, and I did not expect that to be the sentence that broke my group chat. Not the outfit. Not the shoes I clearly overpaid for. The underwear comment. Nine people, three different opinions, and one person who just sent the vomiting emoji four times in a row with no other context, which, fair, I guess, you’re entitled to your reaction.
The chat split almost exactly down the middle between “that’s literally so bad for you, you’re going to get an infection and die” and “girl I’ve worn nothing but thongs since I was sixteen and I’m thriving,” and both sides were SO confident, which is kind of the whole problem with this topic.
Everyone’s operating off one thing that happened to them one time, or one thing their aunt told them, or one Reddit thread from 2019, and treating it like a medical consensus. Nobody’s actually looked into it. I know because I hadn’t either, until my own group chat basically forced my hand.
What’s actually true versus what your cousin told you at a barbecue once
Here’s the thing I found out that genuinely surprised me. The material matters so much more than the style itself, and almost nobody talks about that part. A cotton gusset thong worn all day is a completely different situation than a synthetic, no breathability, basically shrink wrapped situation worn all day, and most of the horror stories I’ve heard, including from people in my own chat, trace back to the second one, not the first. Gynecologists have said this pretty consistently when it comes up in actual health coverage, it’s less “thongs bad” and more “trapped moisture bad,” which, when you say it out loud, is true of literally any underwear, not just thongs specifically.
That doesn’t mean there’s zero risk, and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I did a clinical study out of my apartment in Austin. There is a real, documented thing where the shape of a thong can move bacteria around more easily than a fuller cut, especially if you’re wearing the same pair for twelve hours in ninety degree heat because you forgot to pack a backup, which, guilty, that happened during a shoot in July and it was NOT a good day. But “can” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Can happen isn’t the same as will happen, and definitely isn’t the same as happens if you’re reasonably careful about fabric and changing them out.
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What actually seemed to matter more than daily versus occasional was stuff nobody in my chat brought up at all. Changing out of sweaty ones fast. Not sleeping in the same pair you wore to a spin class. Washing them properly instead of just, you know, rinsing and hoping, which I will admit was a me thing for longer than I want to type out here. The daily part wasn’t the villain. The neglect part was the villain, and the daily part just made the neglect part show up faster.
So is it actually bad, or did the internet just decide it was
Okay so here’s my honest answer, the one I’d give if you texted me directly instead of just watching me talk about it on a screen. No, wearing thongs every day isn’t inherently bad, but wearing the wrong ones every day carelessly kind of is, and those are two different sentences that keep getting mashed into one scary headline. I switched almost entirely to cotton or cotton lined ones about eight months ago, after my friend Marisol, who works in the same building I used to film in, mentioned offhand that she’d had two infections in one year and her doctor asked about fabric before anything else, not frequency. That stuck with me more than any comment section ever did.
I filmed a whole try on for a lingerie brand right after that conversation and almost didn’t post it because I felt weird recommending anything without the caveat attached, so I added it in, and the comments were actually so much calmer than my group chat, which tells you something. People online engaging with an actual explanation versus people in a chat firing off a gut reaction at 11pm are just different conversations entirely.
Would I go back to wearing them every single day if someone told me not to? Honestly, yes, because for me the discomfort of visible lines under literally everything I film in outweighs a risk that, when I actually read into it, was smaller and more manageable than I’d been told. But I’m not going to sit here and act like that’s universal advice, because it’s not, some people’s bodies just don’t tolerate it well no matter what fabric or routine you throw at it, and that’s not a moral failing, that’s just biology being annoying and specific to you.
What I will say, without hedging even a little, is that the “is it bad” panic mostly comes from nobody separating the habit from the execution. Daily’s fine. Sweaty, synthetic, unchanged for fourteen hours daily is not the same thing, and treating them as identical is how you end up with a group chat full of grown women arguing about underwear at midnight instead of just, I don’t know, checking the tag before they buy the pack.
