Hilary Duff and Ashley Benson get candid about periods and puberty in the latest episode of Sarah Hyland’s comedy series “Lady Parts”.
The trio are joined on a video call by Dr. Sherry Ross, with Duff saying when questioned about her first period: “My sister [Haylie] was in L.A. shooting a movie and I was home alone. A couple of the neighbourhood friends came over for a swim and I went inside and I went to the bathroom and there was blood in my bathing suit.
“It wasn’t a ton, so it wasn’t this massive disaster, but I remember seeing it and being like, ‘Oh, my God.’”
“Thank God I had an older sister and I knew exactly what had happened to me,” she adds. “But I remember stomping outside with all my 12-year-old attitude and being like, ‘Leave, leave, you all have to leave.’”
Duff says her family then went for dinner at her aunt’s house that night, instructing her mom to keep the news to herself.
“I just remember bursting into tears,” she recalls, remembering how she thought everybody knew. “It was so emotional. It’s so scary and it’s so big and the feelings around it are just impossible to deal with at the time.”
Benson shares, “I went to an arts school. I was in my dance period — literally period. I just all of a sudden felt like I had, I don’t know, peed myself or something. I ran into the bathroom and I looked and there was just blood everywhere.”
The “Pretty Little Liars” star, who was 14 at the time, remembers she felt “so embarrassed” and for the rest of the week she ended up throwing out all her underwear.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was just stuffing toilet paper in my underwear, basically. And cried.”
Hyland then says, “My first period I got in the middle of ballet class. And of course, the level of ballet that I was in at that time wore those periwinkle blue leotards, so you could tell.
“So I ran out into the bathroom and I just screamed my mom’s name from down the hallway, she just came running and she did the makeshift toilet paper pad in my underwear,” she tells the group.
