What It Must Be My Hormones Actually Does
It Must Be My Hormones is a browser extension designed to filter out period-related advertising and sponsored content from your social media feeds. You know the ones — tampon ads, menstrual cup promotions, hashtag campaigns pushing products during your cycle. The extension works by identifying and blocking those specific types of content so you're not constantly reminded of things you don't need to see right now. I installed it mostly out of curiosity after seeing it recommended in a few forums. Ended up keeping it for months. It does exactly what it says it does, and that's about all you should expect from it.
How It Must Be My Hormones Works
The extension runs as a background process in your browser and monitors outgoing requests and page loads on supported platforms. When it detects content matching its keyword and advertising pattern filters, it blocks the element before it renders. That means you don't see the ad at all. It doesn't just hide it visually — it removes it from the DOM. The supported platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and TikTok. Coverage isn't universal across every region or every third-party ad network. I found that some programmatic ads slipped through on Instagram because they used different domain structures than what the filter list covered. Here's the thing nobody mentions: the extension doesn't block organic posts from your friends talking about their periods. That's intentional. It only targets sponsored and promoted content, which is technically distinct from regular user posts in how the platforms serve them.
Installation and Setup
You grab it from the Chrome Web Store or Firefox Add-ons site depending on your browser. The install is standard — one click, then you go to your extensions page and toggle it on. By default it's active immediately after installation. No configuration required for basic use. If you want to customize the filters, there's a settings panel inside the extension. You can toggle individual platform filters on or off, adjust sensitivity levels, and add custom keywords to the block list. I spent about ten minutes going through the options. Most people won't need to touch it past the defaults. One quirk I ran into: the extension conflicts with certain ad blockers like uBlock Origin if you don't configure them properly. They both hook into the same network requests and can cause page rendering errors on TikTok. The fix is simple — set uBlock to exclude the TikTok domain, or disable It Must Be My Hormones when browsing there. I went with the exclusion route because it preserves blocking on the platforms that matter to me.
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Common Problems and Workarounds
The main complaint I've seen is that the filter list doesn't update frequently enough. Social media platforms change their ad infrastructure regularly. New ad formats appear, new tracking domains get set up. The extension's developer pushes updates, but there's usually a lag time of a couple weeks between when platforms change things and when the filters catch up. Another issue: if you're logged into multiple accounts or use a shared browser profile, the extension might not behave consistently. I noticed gaps in blocking when my secondary work profile was active alongside my personal one. Logging out of the work account while using the extension solved it, but that's not always practical. The most useful feature most people miss is the ability to whitelist specific pages or domains. If you run a small business selling menstrual products and you actually want to run ads through the platform, you can add that domain to the whitelist so it keeps running while everything else gets filtered. This took me about thirty seconds to set up after realizing I was accidentally blocking my own client's campaign links.
What It Doesn't Do
It doesn't track your cycle or use calendar data to time the filtering. That would be a privacy nightmare and the developers avoid it intentionally. It also doesn't block period-related educational content or health information from legitimate sources. If anything looks like a medical or informational post, it passes through. The extension requires an active internet connection to function. That sounds obvious but it means if you're offline and somehow still loading cached pages with embedded ads, nothing gets blocked until you reconnect and reload. There's no mobile app version. It works on desktop browsers only. If you're trying to filter this on your phone, you'd need to use a desktop browser in mobile mode or accept that the filtering won't apply to the native apps.
I've been running it daily for about eight months now. It's not perfect but it does its job well enough that I haven't bothered finding an alternative. The occasional missed ad or blocked legitimate link is a small trade-off for the reduction in unwanted content. If you find yourself getting annoyed by period product advertising across your social feeds, it's worth trying. The free version covers the core functionality and I haven't seen a premium tier that offers anything meaningful enough to justify paying for it.
