Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.

Regina: Hi team. So last week we got a pitch from a listener that I am super into. The listener’s name is Maile, and it’s really good so I’m just gonna play it for you.

Maile: Hey Underunderstood. I have a mystery that I have not been able to solve. When I was pregnant in 2013 I noticed that my white plastic toilet seat was turning blue, and I thought it was from some new jeans, but then I happened to get a new toilet seat and the exact same thing happened. I know it wasn’t from jeans, it wasn’t from anything else. And an internet search showed that this is a thing that happens to pregnant women. And there’s some theories as to why it happens, but it has not been definitively solved. So I would love it if you guys could figure out this issue once and for all. Why are pregnant women turning their toilet seats blue? Thank you.

Regina: Initial reactions?

Adrianne: This can’t be real.

Billy: It’s just odd to me that the implication is that it’s definitely from the buttocks.

Regina: Wait, what else would you be putting on your toilet seat?

Billy: Well she says it’s definitely not jeans, but that does seem way more likely. I mean, like, you know.

Regina: But if you, if you know it’s not jeans, I’m still also like, why are your jeans on your toilet?

John: What if your jeans bleed onto your skin and then that bleeds down to your toilet seat? But then your problem wouldn’t be that the toilet seat is blue. It would be that your legs are blue.

Regina: Exactly. It would be everything. And you would notice that.

Adrianne: I love this because I just have the general sense, as someone who’s never been pregnant, that there’s just this long list of horrors and there’s like the knowns and then the unknown knowns, and then the unknown unknowns. And the list is just endless. And this just really supports that idea.

Regina: Exactly. It’s totally terrifying. Okay, so before anybody Googles to see what the theories are out there, do you have any theories other than jeans?

Adrianne: I am completely stumped. What are toilet seats made of? Just plastic right?

John: They’re usually, I just bought one. They’re coated wood most of the time, but sometimes they’re plastic.

Billy: It seems like the material should be designed so that you can clean anything off of it, but that’s the whole, that’s the whole concept of a toilet is that you can destroy it and then just wipe it down and it’s fine.

John: You can destroy it?

Billy: I don’t know. That’s my philosophy.

Adrianne: Basically what she’s saying happened is that pregnancy changed something about the chemicals on her skin, and something about these chemicals combined with whatever is on a toilet seat caused a chemical reaction to that caused it to turn blue.

Billy: Okay. So I will say my initial reaction to that is like highly skeptical that that could be it. But I will say, having just had a child, there were a lot of things that we would hear when my wife was pregnant that I’d be like, there’s no way that’s a real thing. And then it would turn out to be a real thing. For example, like people would tell us because, because Caitlin was having a lot of heartburn, people would tell us, Oh, that means your baby’s going to have a lot of hair. And I was like, no way. That’s okay. Cute. Nice. Thank you. But that’s actually a real thing. It’s not the hair causing heartburn, but if you have high levels of estrogen in your body, it causes heartburn and it also causes a lot of hair on your baby. So there’s things that are weirdly correlated like that. So maybe it’s possible, but my initial gut reaction is like, there has to be some other explanation.

John: So I have a question. I would like to know what her toilet seats were made out of and how they were coated. Because when I was buying my toilet seat recently, they were all wood coated in enamel, is like the most common thing. So what is in enamel really, and what is in it that can have chemical reactions at all?

Regina: Right. Yes. Well, first I felt like I needed to tell you, so I just, I started Googling. Also Maile sent, a link to an article and in the article they refer to this phenomenon as Smurf butt.

Adrianne: Okay.

Billy: But your actual butt doesn’t turn blue, right?

Regina: Well. No.

Billy: Are there photos?

Regina: There’s a photo in this article and then yes, I have another one that has a lot more photos.

Billy: I need to see this.

Regina: But it’s subtle and it looks like something that kind of happens over time. It’s not like one specific imprint, which is also one of the arguments against it being jeans or something like that. And yeah, it doesn’t seem like their skin is changing color. It’s just the seat.

Adrianne: Huh. It’s very light.

John: So this reminds me of like, if you’ve been on a roller coaster, like a really worn seat on a roller coaster, how it kind of like rubs into like a blurred, like it’s revealing something underneath.

Regina: Yeah. So yeah, initially people thought that it was, it was maternity jeans bleeding onto their skin more than their regular jeans did. But then for the reasons we’ve talked about, that doesn’t really make sense. And then one woman at some point went to the doctor, and they thought it was maybe because the prenatal vitamin that she was taking was blue. Then there were women who didn’t have new maternity jeans and also weren’t taking that prenatal vitamin, and they also had the same issues. One realistic sounding theory that Metro laid out in this article is a condition called Chromhidrosis, which is basically a disorder of the sweat glands, where in your underarms, and like your breasts and certain places on the face, your sweat will change its color.

Adrianne: So there’s this snake oily supplement that gets sold on like Infowars and other sites like that that turns your skin blue, like really blue.

Billy: Oh, that’s actually a good lead. That’s interesting because I know there are a lot of products marketed towards pregnant women for like, reducing the likelihood of stretch marks and stuff like that.

Adrianne: Yeah. Hang on, let me find this. It’s silver something. Colloidal silver. This is also like it really turns your skin blue and it sounds like these women, their butts are not blue.

Regina: No, this is different.

Billy: Right? So that supports the theory that it’s not something staining their butt, it’s something coming out of their butt and their butt area.

Regina: Exactly. Like sweat.

Billy: Okay.

Regina: Right. But so the thing is, and so I think that the sweat changing color thing is pretty realistic, especially because as I was going on different sites that were talking about this in different forms, some women said that like they would have white shirts that would get armpit stains that were blue. So I do think the sweat thing is related, but the thing that I haven’t found is a link between pregnancy and Chromhidrosis so I want to talk to some experts about that particular theory. There’s, so there’s one other theory, which is pseudo-Chromhidrosis, which is more common. And basically it’s like, it’s the same idea where sweat becomes a different color, but it happens because of contact with something else. So contact with a dye or a chemical or something that reacts differently. It can be a bacteria, but it doesn’t explain, you know, the people who have had it on their shirts. and it doesn’t explain why it only happens during pregnancy.

Adrianne: You said that this condition causes the sweat to be different colors, but are all of the pregnant women talking about blues specifically?

Regina: Yes. They’ve all been talking about blue, which is another thing that I’m wondering because yeah, it says it can be red, blue, green, yellow, pink, or black.
But all of these have been saying blue, and so I’m wondering if it is because, is there something that’s happening specifically to pregnant women? And so I’m wondering if that plus it all being blue, if there’s a coincidence there.

Billy: I have a question.

Regina: Yes.

Billy: Do we know if all of these women ended up having baby boys? Is this some kind of, it’s just some kind of divine gender reveal where the Lord looks down and it turns the toilet seat blue?

Adrianne: And that’s how you know.

Billy: Yes. I’m stumped.

Adrianne: Yeah. This is super weird.

John: Hey, Regina? Regina?

Regina: Yes.

John: I have a lot of faith that you will get to the bottom of this.

Regina: John, I should’ve known from the way you said “hey Regina” that a pun was coming.

Billy: Hey Regina.

Regina: What?

Billy: I’m really convinced you can crack the story wide open.

Adrianne: Don’t worry. I’m not going to do one.

[music]

Adrianne: After the break. Regina plumbs the depths for the answer.

Regina: All right, we’re back. We’re blue. We’re ready to go.

John: You’re blue too?

Regina: Okay, technically I’m not blue, but you understood what I meant.

Billy: You should start with yo, listen up. Here’s the story.

John: Oh, should that be the transition song?

Billy: I’m just saying.

Regina: No.

Adrianne: Should that be our theme song?

Billy: So, so what’s up? Did you talk to anyone?

Regina: Yes, I did. I talked to an expert and said expert had a hypothesis. But before we get to that, I think we should lay out all the variables in this situation that made it complicated. So there was no, like one single thing that was consistent across all of these cases. You know, like different pants, different vitamins, different types of toilet seats, different cleaning products, et cetera.

Billy: Different butts.

Regina: Different butts, different butt shapes. Some are more pear, some are more apple. It even sometimes happens to women who haven’t or have never been pregnant, like are menopausal and even occasionally it happened to men.

John: To men?

Regina: Yes, to men.

Billy: To men.

Regina: Not all men, but some men.

John: So we have like a ‘Junior’ situation probably.

Regina: No, they did not end up being pregnant. That would be a wild, like instead of Billy’s gender reveal, if this was a pregnancy test.

John: It’s a toilet designed for this.

Billy: That’s how I’ll know. I’ll look down and see the blue imprint of my bottom. Then I’ll know something historic has just happened.

Regina: Okay. So I emailed a ton of experts and a lot of them didn’t get back to me. Some people who did get back to me and told me that initially they had thought I was trolling them and so I think that might be why so many people didn’t get back to me. But eventually I did hear back from someone who hadn’t heard of the problem, but he was like very excited to investigate it.

Andrei: Hello.

Regina: So that’s Andrei Rebarber. He works at Maternal Fetal Medicine Associates in Manhattan.

Andrei: We do a lot of prenatal diagnosis, ultrasound and prenatal care and delivery of high risk patients in our practice.

John: What was Andrei’s reaction to this question? How did he, why did he respond but nobody else did?

Regina: It’s funny because he said, he was like, my coworkers kind of thought I was crazy. They thought you were trolling me.

Andrei: They’re like, nah, I don’t think this is real. I said, nah, looks like it’s real after I looked it up on the internet, but I don’t know. Alright. I’m listening.

Regina: And I think he was particularly into it because of the idea of this happening to a lot of women and then women not being comfortable enough to talk to their doctors, I think is relevant.

Adrianne: Or talking to their doctors and having their doctors not believe them and say, “Oh, it’s probably maternity jeans.”

Regina: And that did happen a lot. Like there were women who went and their doctors said it was maternity jeans or it was the prenatal vitamin. There was one where she like called the hotline and the nurse just like laughed her off the phone basically. And it’s like, I get it. It’s kind of funny, but at the same time this is associated with like your hormones shifting stuff is happening in your body that you don’t quite understand. So I do think like you should be able to talk to your doctor about it, even if it’s a little weird.

Andrei: I wonder whether patients are so embarrassed or they just don’t, you know, they think it’s so strange they wouldn’t even tell their doctor because, you know, that sounds strange. And most doctors, they would even, you know, kind of make fun of it.

Regina: Even though Andrei hadn’t heard of it before. He did do a bunch of research before our first call, and so he already had his hypothesis ready, but first he gave me some really helpful background of like this aspect of kind of what is happening in a woman’s body when they’re pregnant.

Andrei: Well, their theory that the, with estrogen and progesterone being increased significantly and there’s more heat dissipation because pregnant women have a higher metabolic rate because the fetuses inside emits a lot of heat. And the heat itself probably creates more sweating and they’re hotter.

Regina: Basically what he’s saying is these women’s hormone levels are increasing and their body is hot because you know it’s responsible for another human life that’s growing inside of it.

John: And that’s just causing them to sweat more?

Regina: Exactly. So that causes them to sweat more.

John: But he’s not saying their sweat is blue.

Regina: No. But then there’s our good old friend Chromhidrosis.

Andrei: There is a biological basis for Chromhidrosis. So where basically the sweat changes color in some people, and it seems to be due to a residue or breakdown of fat in these organelles called lysosomes.

Regina: These lysosomes break down fat-containing residue, and then that fat residue is what can cause some discoloration.

Andrei: And so they end up, particularly in the face and underarms, where they’ll have this Chromhidrosis change and often it takes a yellowish color, but it may take different colors.

John: He said it often takes a yellowish color, like that’s, it’s the most common one, a yellow color?

Regina: The most common one, it seems like is yellow.

John: Hmm.

Adrianne: So if people had this condition and they were staining their toilet seat yellow, maybe they would think that was more of a natural aging of the toilet seat, and it’s the blue that sets off alarms.

Regina: Exactly.

Billy: A yellowing isn’t that out of the ordinary for something that’s worn or stained or something

Adrianne: Like a white shirt.

Regina: Exactly. So it’s really the blue that is alarming everybody.

Andrei: And then one of the theories are that, additionally with Chromhidrosis, in addition to that, is that there is certain bacteria on the skin that may actually also alter and affect the change in the color of sweat. So combine the bacterial theory with potentially the increase in secretion of sweat affected by pregnancy, that it may be why they’re getting this discoloration in the toilet seat.

Regina: This certain kind of bacteria on your skin can change the sweat that your body secretes. So it looks like Smurfs are using your toilet seat.

John: Extremely large Smurfs.

Regina: But we still haven’t really fully solved the problem, because there’s still the issue of why the stains are blue since Andrei did say it’s usually yellow.

Adrianne: Is there a third variable that gets introduced that changes the Chromhidrosis sweat from yellow to blue?

Regina: Well, so we think that the key there is actually the toilet seats themselves.

John: Huh.

Andrei: The theory, is that on the coating of the toilet seat, there is an antimicrobial coating on them and that may actually cause the color change to be bluish rather than a different color, a more yellowish or other stains that are associated traditionally with Chromhidrosis.

Adrianne: So Chromhidrosis is causing everything else to turn yellow, like you might see it in your sheets or your white shirts, but because the toilet seat is covered in this antimicrobial, I guess that’s for hygiene, coating. It’s having an additional reaction that’s causing that color to go from yellow to blue.

Regina: Exactly.

John: What is in this coating?

Adrianne: Yeah. What’s in the coating?

Regina: It’s like a silver that has this reaction it seems like. And so, and that’s the other reason that it kind of is faint at first and then over time it gets darker and darker. And it’s, I think because of the silver that’s used in the antimicrobial coatings.

John: Silver, like, like the thing that Adrianne found. The snake oil stuff.

Adrianne: Colloidal silver.

Billy: I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of a chemical reaction happening under my butt. Every time I sit on the toilet, like I know it’s for hygiene, that they’re coated this way, but it makes me very uncomfortable.

John: I have a lot of questions about this coding actually, because like, what is it? It’s antimicrobial?

Regina: Yeah. Anti-microbial.

John: How long does that last? Cause it’s like toilet seats, you change every decade.

Regina: Yeah. And people have had, it happen on old toilet seats and new toilet seats.

John: Wait, that’s crazy. So this is like, there’s some coating on there that’s doing like chemical work for a really long time.

Billy: Well, when you look at toilets that are for sale, when you go potty browsing, they tout the antimicrobial coding on the seats. Because I actually was looking, I was trying to figure out if commercial toilets were any different because there didn’t seem to be anybody reporting this on commercial toilet seats, this is all at home. So I was like, maybe commercial ones don’t have the antimicrobial coding because they just assume they’re going to be cleaned at least once a day. But those ones also seem to advertise antimicrobial coding.

Regina: Yeah. There definitely was one forum post of a woman who it was happening to her at work, and she was mortified because she was like, all my coworkers know that I go to the bathroom more often than them, they’re gonna know it’s me. And she’s like, maybe I should say something. I don’t know. And it was, I felt very bad.

Billy: I’m still confused what this has to do with pregnancy.

Regina: Actually that’s a great question, because that was my one rating question. And that basically has to do with the hormones.

Andrei: The pregnant state, you sweat more. There’s more sweat from an estrogen, progesterone effect. You add in the fact that there’s bacteria colonization there and additionally something on the toilet, which is coating, and that changes it into that blue hue.

Regina: All of the people who have had this happen, the, the thing that I was looking for, the consistent thing among them was a change in hormone levels, whether it was related to pregnancy, which is the most common one, or whether it was related to birth control, a change in that, or starting to go through menopause.

Andrei: I mean, nowadays you have various different birth control pills or IUDs with progesterone in them. You have progesterone-only pills, they call them mini pills. And, so yeah, you’re giving exogenous progesterone. In fact we treat as a risk factor for preterm birth. If you had a prior preterm birth, we give it even exogenous progesterone during pregnancy itself.

Regina: Oh, interesting.

Andrei: For the prevention of preterm birth and some people believe that might be helpful for patients who are at risk. So you know that that all that extra progesterone around, which we often think is benign, maybe turning the toilet seats blue.

John: You said earlier that this happens also to men sometimes?

Regina: Yes. and so that’s not a progesterone, but it is androgens.

Andrei: Well, increased androgens, high testosterone levels will also increase sweat And so in males progesterone’s function sort of crosses over, but androgens, high androgens, will increase sweat.

John: So not a ‘Junior’ situation.

Regina: So once I had Andrei’s hypothesis, I called Maile, the woman who originally submitted this pitch and gave her the update.

Maile: Wow.
Regina: How do you feel?
Maile: That is so interesting. So I, I really feel validated that it is a real thing and it is interesting. It’s like, it’s a combination of things. The hormonal change, you know, a certain bacteria that not everyone has, and then, you know, an antimicrobial coating that may or may not be on a toilet seat. You just have to basically have like all these things line up in order for this to happen.
Regina: The other thing that I thought was interesting that came out of this phone call with Maile is that she said that she noticed the toilet seat in her second trimester, and so I kind of asked her if she felt like that lined up with some hormonal shifts in her pregnancy.
Did you feel any like strong hormonal changes in your second trimester verse in your first trimester when this started happening?
Maile: Yeah, definitely. I, you know, each trimester felt kind of, significantly different than pretty much as soon as the second trimester started, I had a huge jolt of energy. I felt amazing. I think that that happens to a lot of, in a lot of women the second trimester. But yeah, the second trimester definitely seemed like a big hormonal shift.
Regina: So it’s, it has a lot to do with hormones. It has a lot to do with the bacteria on the skin and this anti microbial coating. Oh, and I have a parting gift for anybody who has experienced this. It’s not a scientific or anything, but I did see on one of the forums a little bit buried that if you put acetone on the toilet seat, it will not make the stain go away completely, but it will make it fade. And that might be better than all of these people who are using Magic Erasers.

[music]

Billy: That’s our show. Underunderstood is Regina Dellea, Adrianne Jefries, John Lagomarsino, and me, Billy Disney.

Adrianne: If you like the show, we have a website. You should check it out. It’s underunderstood.com. We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit. Come find us.

Regina: If you have a question that the internet can’t answer, send it to hello@underunderstood.com and we might answer it. It worked for Maile.

Billy: Yeah. Send us your stories. We won’t butt-shame you.

John: Thanks for listening. We will be back with another show next week.

[music]

Billy: I would like to offer another solution.

Regina: Oh God.

Billy: So I did a little research of my own and I’m going to send you guys a link here.

Regina: Are you going to paint the toilet seat? What are you going to say here?
Billy: Well, I found a toilet that comes in a light blue color.

John: Ooh.

Billy: Dresden blue. It’s made by a company called Peerless Pottery.

John: Is it clay?

Billy: I don’t know, but I like the name Peerless Pottery cause they are peerless in that you can’t get any other light blue toilet made new. You can get some vintage ones but this is the only new one I could find.

John: The toilet itself is light blue.

Regina: I actually think that my toilet at home was blue, was this light blue color.

Billy: They make a lot of very cool colors. In addition to Dresden blue, you can get harvest gold, Venetian pink, bone, biscuit.

Adrianne: Bone?

Billy: Beige.

Adrianne: Please enjoy our bone toilet.

Billy: Yeah. Comes in bone and biscuit. So, you know.

Regina: That’s a really good solution, Billy. Thank you for that.

Billy: Thank you. Thanks.