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Materials engineer Shagun Maheshwari spent five years building the world's first blood-coagulating menstrual pad. In Part 1, she explains why the industry tests pads against saline rather than blood, takes a conventional pad apart layer by layer, and reveals the reframe — keep dry, don't just absorb — that led to a pad which clots blood in place.

Key topics in this part:

• Why pads are tested against water/saline, and how menstrual blood differs
• The four-layer anatomy of a conventional pad (top sheet, ADL, core, back sheet)
• Super absorbent polymer (SAP) and why it collapses under body weight
• The reframe from "absorb more" to "keep the person dry"
• How a physical, charge-based clot works (vs the biological clotting cascade)
• The naturally derived long-chain sugar coagulant, and how it was found
• Whether some "period problems" are actually product-design problems
• Industry inertia around cheap, mass-produced SAP

Timestamps:

• 00:00 — Hookable intro
• 00:40 — Biohacking Eve intro
• 01:05 — Episode summary
• 02:05 — Conversation begins: from smart contact lenses to period pads
• 07:00 — Optimising for the wrong metric; periods vs product problems
• 14:00 — What's in blood, and why it's hard to engineer for
• 16:00 — Pad anatomy, layer by layer
• 20:00 — Why fluid comes back out under load
• 21:00 — How coagulation works inside Papaya's pad
• 28:00 — The coagulant material and how it was identified
• 31:00 — Cliffhanger → outro

References mentioned in this part:

• Mojo Vision — smart contact lens company
• Super absorbent polymer / sodium polyacrylate (SAP)
• Stayfree, Whisper/Always — pad brands referenced

Guest & product links:

• Website: papayapads.com
• Instagram: @papaya.india and @shagun.maheshwari
• LinkedIn (Shagun): https://www.linkedin.com/in/maheshwarishagun/
• LinkedIn (company): https://www.linkedin.com/company/papayaindia/

Insta/TikTok: @BiohackingEve
Website: www.BiohackingEve.com