The Duchess of Edinburgh has called for tampons and sanitary pads to be kept “out of the closet” to end the taboo over menstrual health.

Sophie, who is carrying on with royal duties while the King is preparing for treatment for an enlarged prostate and while the Prince and Princess of Wales are also off after Kate’s abdominal surgery, visited Harris Girls’ Academy in East Dulwich, south London, on Wednesday.

The duchess chatted to guests about her own experiences of heavy periods and being worried about tampons falling out of her handbag on official royal engagements.

The duchess said: “The number of times I’ve been on an engagement and I’ve left my bag and a little child has picked my bag up and if they drop things on the floor and all of sudden a tampon rolls out across the floor…OK.”

Sophie, 59, who has been open in the past about the challenges women face during the menopause, spoke candidly to the teenagers during a menstrual health workshop about heavy periods.

“Well, for girls who have heavy periods, worrying about when you stand up from a chair… That’s the worst one,” she said.

The teenagers nodded in agreement, with workshop leader Tanya Simon Hall remarking: “I think we all know that one.”

The duchess called for period products to be on display at home rather than locked away, adding: “A lot of the companies that make these products whether they be pads or tampons try to make them quite attractive.

“And then what do we do with it?… Hidden in the cupboard.”

She added: “We need to bring them, get the products out of the closet.. because actually that is going to create another part of the conversation.

“If your six-year-old little sister picks up one of these and goes ‘what’s this for?’ Then you can have the conversation at home.”

The duchess said keeping period products hidden away treated them like a “taboo thing”.

She also asked the girls whether they felt conscious about tampon size.

“If you were going shopping and your friends are going for the mini and regular tampons are you going to feel self-conscious saying ‘I need the big guns’?” she said.

“It’s not because of the size of what you are thinking ‘Oh I must be really big down there’.”

The duchess is patron of Wellbeing of Women, the women’s health charity.

The workshop was part of Wellbeing of Women’s Just A Period campaign, which aims to educate girls and young women about heavy bleeding and pain, so that they know when and how to seek medical help.

The campaign aims to end the shame and stigma surrounding talking about and getting help for periods

Eleven girls and three boys took part in the interactive workshop which talked about what a ‘normal’ period looks like and informed them about conditions such as adenomyosis, fibroids and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).

Dame Lesley Regan, chairwoman of Wellbeing of Women, said: “We need to educate and empower girls and young women about their periods so that they can take control of this important aspect of their health and wellbeing from an early age.

“Most girls and women can expect to have 12 periods a year for nearly 40 years of their lives, so understanding an event that occurs so regularly is crucial.”

The Duchess of Sussex has previously highlighted the plight of girls stigmatised over periods.

Before she married the Duke of Sussex, Meghan wrote a piece for Time magazine in 2017 about how the taboo affected girls in India.

Writing about a visit to Delhi and Mumbai with the organisation World Vision, Meghan said: “During my time in the field, many girls shared that they feel embarrassed to go to school during their periods, ill-equipped with rags instead of pads, unable to participate in sports and, without bathrooms available to care for themselves, they often opt to drop out of school entirely.”

She added: “When a girl misses school because of her period, cumulatively that puts her behind her male classmates by 145 days.”

The duchess, who stopped being a working member of the royal family in 2020, also spoke about the issue when she met students from the Association of Commonwealth Universities in 2019.