This article covers product labelling and consumer guidance. It is not medical advice. If you have concerns about your bladder, speak to your GP.
Picture the chemist's aisle. Two incontinence pads, side by side. One shows four drops. So does the other. You take the cheaper one, or the brand you half-recognise, on the reasonable assumption that four drops means four drops. It does not. There is no rule that says it should.
How the drop system works, and where it falls apart
The drop symbol is a manufacturer's own shorthand for where a product sits in their own range: light, moderate, heavy. Three drops from a brand is heavier than two drops from that same brand. That part is true and useful.
What it does not tell you is anything about absolute absorbency, because every brand invented its own scale. One brand might run a scale up to eight drops and put its heavy product at five. Another runs a four-drop scale and puts its heavy product at four. If both happen to print "four drops," that comparison tells you nothing, because four out of eight and four out of four are not the same claim. And the total number of drops on a brand's scale, the bit you would need to make sense of it, is usually nowhere obvious on the box.
The case that makes it concrete
In November 2023 the UK Advertising Standards Authority ruled on a comparison involving Procter and Gamble (the maker of Always Discreet) and TENA. On their respective packaging the two pads in question looked roughly comparable, rated around six drops and around five and a half drops on each brand's own scale.
Then both were put through the Rothwell test, the international standard method (ISO 11948-1) for measuring how much a pad can hold. The Always pad came out at 242.63g, a Rothwell grade of 4. The TENA pad came out at 453.11g, a grade of 6. Two full bands apart on the standardised scale, and nearly double the capacity, from two products whose own packaging numbers looked about the same. The ASA concluded plainly that the grading of absorbency was not standardised across different brands of incontinence pads.
That gap is not a rounding error. If a pad holding 242g gets you roughly two hours, a pad holding 453g could plausibly get you to four or more. A man choosing on drop symbols alone has no way of knowing that. The packaging is not lying, exactly. It is misleading by leaving the important bit out.
A footnote worth knowing: in its response to the case, P&G noted TENA had since moved that product up to seven drops on its own scale. Brands are free to adjust their own drop numbers, and there is no industry-standard definition forcing those numbers to mean the same thing. Misleading comparative claims can still be challenged at the ASA, as this case shows, but the drop count on the box is not a regulated, like-for-like measure, and you should not treat it as one.
What to look at instead
Until labelling is standardised, the drop symbol is only good for one job: comparing products within a single brand's range. Across brands it is close to meaningless. So:
- Look for the absorbency figure in grams or millilitres, often on the pack or the manufacturer's datasheet, rather than the drops. It is still a lab number with its own limits, but at least it is a real measurement you can compare.
- Treat "heavy" or "maximum" from one brand as no guarantee it beats "heavy" from another. They are not graded against each other.
- Judge a product on how it performs across a real day for your body, not on the symbol on the box. Fit, speed of absorption and how it copes with a sudden flood matter as much as headline capacity, and none of those show up in the drops either.
That last point is the whole reason this site exists. The number on the box is a starting point, not an answer, and the only test that counts is the one you run wearing it.
Not medical advice. General information only.