The history of condoms

After the Western Roman Empire fell in the 5th century, contraceptive knowledge largely vanishes from the European written record, and even pessaries, well documented in antiquity, don’t reappear until the 15th century. So if any condom style device had existed under Rome, knowledge of it was lost in this thousand year silence. The next firm point in the whole story is Gabriele Falloppio’s linen sheath, described in a book published in 1564, which remains the earliest undisputed condom in history and the benchmark every claim above fails to meet. ^11,4,5

The modern scholarly consensus on everything above is sceptical. Youssef’s peer reviewed 1993 history found no evidence for condoms in ancient Egypt and traces the reliable record only to Falloppio in 1564, medical historian Vern Bullough wrote in 1981 that the condom’s origin is “lost in the myths of antiquity”, and Carl Djerassi dated effective condoms to the era of vulcanised rubber. Even Aine Collier, the most generous compiler of the ancient claims, concedes they’re speculative, oblique and vague, while her critics note her book cites no ancient sources at all for its Greek and Roman condoms. So a careful timeline of this era is a timeline of claims, not condoms. ^4,17,18

During Charles VIII of France’s siege of Naples, a vicious new disease broke out among his mercenary army, and when the army disbanded the soldiers carried the French disease across Europe within 5 years. Contemporary accounts describe something far nastier than later syphilis, with pustules, flesh destruction and death within months. This epidemic is the reason the condom came back to Europe. The first sheaths of the era were built against infection, not pregnancy. ^19,20,21

Alongside Falloppio’s treated linen, sheaths made from sheep intestine, pig bladder and fine leather came into use across Renaissance Europe, while writers like Hercules Saxonia around 1597 described improved full-length linen versions. The gut ones won on feel, being thinner and more supple, and “skins” stayed the dominant condom material for the next 300 years. That same caecum processing tradition survives today in lambskin condoms. ^22,21,23

The Flemish Jesuit theologian Leonardus Lessius condemned penile sheaths as immoral in his treatise De iustitia et iure. Here’s the twist, his condemnation is the first documentary evidence that people were using condoms to avoid pregnancy, because there’d be nothing to condemn on birth control grounds otherwise. It kicked off a theological argument that ran for centuries. ^24,11,25

The earliest attestations lexicographers accept are Scottish. A document written after 6 March 1705 mentions the Duke of Argyll carrying “a certaine instrument called a Quondam” against disease, and in 1706 Lord Belhaven’s poem A Scots Answer to a British Vision rhymed “Sirenge and Condum” with “Virtuous Quondam”. That couplet is the OED’s earliest evidence for the word. ^30,29,33

Early spellings bounce around between condum, condon, cundum and quondam, and the proposed origins include Latin condere meaning to conceal or sheathe, a Persian word for a gut storage vessel, and the French town of Condom in Gascony. None of them survives scrutiny. The definitive study, William Kruck’s Looking for Dr. Condom from 1981, concluded the origin “remains completely unknown”, and the OED still effectively agrees. That makes condom one of the very few common English words with a genuinely unknown origin. ^30,29,33

London surgeon Daniel Turner gave the condom its first extended medical discussion in his 1717 syphilis treatise, and he was against it, arguing the dulled sensation meant men would rather “risk a clap” than wear one, and that it emboldened them into unsafe encounters. The physician Joseph Cam answered him in print, defending the device. Sound familiar? It’s the ancestor of every risk compensation argument about condoms since. ^34,22,21

Take the caecum, the blind gut, of a sheep. Soak it for hours, turn it inside out, macerate it in lye, scrape off the mucous membrane, bleach and soften it over burning sulphur vapour, wash it, blow it up, dry it, cut it to about 190mm and finish it with a ribbon to tie around the base. They were expensive, so people washed and reused them, which explains why condoms stayed an upmarket and unreliable technology right up until rubber. Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum holds a surviving sheep gut condom, original envelope and all, from this same manufacturing tradition. ^22,23,35

London’s condom trade was run largely by women. Mrs Phillips operated a wholesale and retail “machine” warehouse at the Sign of the Green Canister off the Strand, advertising a “great choice of skins and bladders” and exporting to France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while fighting a public handbill war with her rival Mrs Perkins over who was counterfeiting whom. Surviving bills carry sales verse like “To guard yourself from shame or fear, Votaries to Venus, hasten here”. ^36,37,38

The French royal physician Jean Astruc described in his venereology text De Morbis Venereis how English “libertines” protected themselves with fine sheep gut sheaths, which he said the English called “condum”, though he doubted their reliability. His account fixed the condom’s English association for good, which is why the French called it the capote anglaise and Casanova called it the English riding coat. ^22,11,6

The mock-heroic poem The Machine; or, Love’s Preservative, published under the pseudonym Philo-Puttanus and traditionally attributed to White Kennett the younger, praised the “cundum” at length, and bawdy tributes to the device circulated freely in London print culture. The condom was being advertised, joked about and versified decades before any respectable doctor would endorse it. ^11,29,6

Young James Boswell‘s private London Journal records his encounters with London prostitutes and his on-again, off-again use of a condom he called his “armour”, including one engagement “in armour” on Westminster Bridge itself. He hated the dulled sensation, skipped it often, and caught gonorrhoea repeatedly for his trouble. Rediscovered and published in 1950, it’s the frankest first-person account of everyday condom use, and non-use, in the entire 18th century. ^39,22,6

As our era opens, condoms are still handmade from sheep intestine and priced like luxury goods. In the US before 1840 a single skin condom cost about $1 when a labourer earned roughly $14 a week, so you washed it and reused it, and the buyers were almost all well off men guarding against syphilis and gonorrhoea rather than pregnancy. ^11,43,44

Britain’s Thomas Hancock examined samples of Goodyear’s cured rubber, worked out that sulphur was the trick, and filed a UK patent on 21 November 1843, weeks before Goodyear’s US patent was granted. The two fought over priority for the rest of their careers and British courts sided with Hancock, whose associate William Brockedon coined the word vulcanisation after the Roman god of fire. The upshot for us is that rubber condoms emerged on both sides of the Atlantic at once. ^48,49,50

Don’t picture anything modern. Early rubber condoms had walls around 2mm thick, about a bicycle inner tube, plus a seam and a strong rubber smell, and you washed, relubricated and reused them until they perished. The earliest widely sold style from around 1858 covered only the glans, in principle fitted to size by a doctor, and full length seamed condoms followed by 1869. ^11,23,53

In 1861 The New York Times carried an advertisement for Dr. Power’s French Preventatives, generally cited as the first condom ad in a major American newspaper. Enjoy the openness while it lasts, because within 12 years advertising them would be a federal crime. ^11,52

Factory production drove prices down steadily from the 1860s, and by the late 1800s thin seamless condoms made by dipping glass moulds had decisively undercut skin ones, flipping skin into the premium niche and rubber into the mass market. This crossover is when condoms became affordable to working class buyers, and ‘rubber’ settled in as everyday American slang for the thing itself. ^43,54,11

Comstock spent 4 decades running stings and decoy letters against mail order contraceptive sellers, and by his own count made around 4,000 arrests. Harper’s Weekly tallied 3,697 people arraigned up to 1914, with 2,740 convicted or pleading guilty, and his biographers attribute about 15 suicides of arrested defendants to his prosecutions, including the abortionist Madame Restell in 1878. It was the enforcement, not just the statute, that pushed the American condom trade underground. ^58,59,60

The trade never stopped, it just renamed itself. Condoms were sold as ‘rubber goods for gents’, ‘male shields’, ‘French male safes’ and ‘the English letter’, hiding behind the legally safe words protection and safety, moving through barbershops, saloons, rubber goods dealers and mail order circulars. With the legitimate industry scared off, a large share of US supply became unbranded, untested black market product, which is exactly why brand trust would later be worth so much. ^43,54,11

Comstockery wasn’t just an American quirk. The UK’s Indecent Advertisements Act 1889 made advertising condoms illegal across Britain and Ireland while leaving their sale lawful, and Canada’s first Criminal Code in 1892 threatened 2 years’ jail for selling or advertising anything meant to prevent conception, a provision that survived until 1969. The Australian colonies inherited the same British obscenity framework, which is why condoms here stayed behind the chemist’s counter well into the 20th century. ^61,62,11

Europe squeezed the condom too, but always left the same gap. Imperial Germany’s obscenity code, tightened in 1900, restricted how contraceptives could be advertised or displayed without banning them, and France’s law of 31 July 1920 banned contraception outright yet exempted condoms as disease prophylactics. Across the continent the condom survived every contraception ban the same way, by being called disease prevention. ^63,64,65

With the mainstream rubber industry legally deterred from the trade, much of the pre war condom supply was black market product nobody tested, and defects were common. The precise failure percentages you sometimes see quoted actually come from 1930s studies, but the problem was real enough that per unit testing became the entire selling point for brands like Fromms and Trojan, and the origin of modern condom standards. ^43,69,11

Margaret Sanger launched The Woman Rebel in March 1914, was indicted under the Comstock Act and fled to Europe while her pamphlet Family Limitation circulated in the tens of thousands, then came home and opened America’s first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn on 16 October 1916. Police shut it after 9 days and she served 30 days in the workhouse. Sanger herself preferred the diaphragm and was lukewarm on condoms, but her prosecution produced the legal opening condoms walked through. ^73,74,75

In 1916 Merle Youngs began making condoms in New York and selling the Trojan brand through pharmacies, a deliberate respectability play against the barbershop trade. He invested in testing to eliminate pinholes and tears, which made Trojans dearer than untested rivals but far more trusted, and his 1930 trademark win later established that condom makers could hold enforceable trademarks despite the Comstock Act. Trojan still dominates the US market. ^69,76,77

The militaries that studied the war concluded prophylaxis worked, and by the late 1920s the US Navy, then the Army as standard issue in 1931, reversed the wartime refusal, after which service VD rates fell steeply. The war also sent millions of demobilised men home familiar with condoms, European soldiers because they’d been issued them, American soldiers because they’d bought them anyway, feeding the interwar boom in demand. ^78,82,11

Latex condoms stretched to about 800% of their size before breaking and kept for around 5 years, against roughly 3 months for the old cement dipped rubber. No petrol or benzene in the process also meant factories stopped catching fire, and the product got cheaper. Thick seamed rubber condoms vanished within a decade, and skin condoms retreated to a niche. ^11,83,72

Public contraceptive advertising was still legally dangerous in America, so Youngs Rubber advertised Trojan in a pharmacists’ trade magazine instead and sold only through drug stores. Playing respectable against the ‘pirate’ brands in bars and barber shops turned out to be excellent legal positioning, as the 1930 court case would prove. ^69,84,43

Eric Ansell’s Melbourne condom workshop formally became Ansell Rubber Co in 1929, then won wartime government contracts for condoms, surgical gloves and gas masks. The family automated glove making in 1946 and the condom lines by 1952, and in a tidy twist Dunlop, the company Eric had left, bought Ansell in 1969 and by 2002 had renamed the entire group after it. ^66,67,88

Killian of Akron, Ohio patented the first fully automated condom production line, glass forms riding a conveyor through latex tanks, drying and curing. A system cost about $20,000, roughly $390,000 in today’s money, and the hand dippers who couldn’t afford one were driven out of business while prices fell hard. ^11,43,72

Youngs Rubber sued a Trojan imitator, who argued a contraceptive couldn’t hold a trademark because its trade was illegal under the Comstock Act. The court disagreed, ruling that condoms had lawful uses like disease prevention, which gave the legitimate trade legal cover and set up the bigger win of 1936. ^89,84,52

Landau, a Polish born rubber technology student in London, developed a workable latex dipping process, and L.A. Jackson funded him to set up British Latex Products, supplying London Rubber under the Durex brand from 1932. He left under a cloud in 1953 and was written out of official Durex history until historian Jessica Borge’s archival work restored him. ^85,90,11

Condom sales grew right through the Depression, with America’s top 15 makers producing around 1.5 million a day by the mid 1930s and Americans spending over $33 million a year on them. Respectable pharmacy brands like Trojan and Ramses shared the market with a huge grey trade in cheap ‘pirate’ brands flogged through bars, barber shops and petrol stations. ^43,11,72

A biochemist, widely identified as Cecil Voge, filled 2,000 condoms with air and then water and found about 60% leaked, while the industry itself reckoned only a quarter of its output was tested before packaging. The press turned condom quality into a national scandal, and regulation followed within 2 years. ^11,91,43

US Customs seized a parcel of diaphragms posted from Japan to a doctor at Margaret Sanger’s New York clinic, and the resulting appeal gutted the federal Comstock regime. The court held the law couldn’t have been meant to obstruct legitimate medicine, so physician supplied contraception was effectively legal, normalising the trade the condom industry was already running. ^92,93,94

After the leak scandal the FDA classified condoms as a drug and required every one to be tested before packaging, then seized 864,000 defective condoms in a single month of 1940 once its enforcement powers kicked in. Manufacturers cleaned up at home, though rejects were quietly exported to markets where that stayed legal. ^11,91,43

Youngs Rubber went first, installing automatic equipment designed by Arthur Youngs, Merle’s brother, to test every single condom rather than sampling batches. Electronic pinhole testing of each condom on a mandrel became the industry norm through the 1940s, and it’s still how the condoms in our database are checked today. ^11,43

Mussolini’s Italy restricted contraception to drive up the birth rate, and Nazi Germany went further, plain brown wrappers from 1933 and then a January 1941 police ordinance banning civilian contraceptive production outright. Manufacture never stopped though, because the Wehrmacht kept issuing condoms to its troops throughout the war. Condom policy has always been population politics. ^11,78,95

Germany’s Wehrmacht received condoms all war despite the civilian ban, and Japan’s military supplied its troops as well, including within its system of forced prostitution, a war crimes context rather than a public health one. Army issue Japanese condoms reportedly carried brand names like ‘Totsugeki Ichiban’, or Assault No. 1, though the sourcing on that name is thin. ^11,78,100

Australia already had a condom industry, Dunlop made them from the 1890s and Eric Ansell bought the equipment in 1905 to found Ansell in Richmond, Melbourne. Through the 1930s and the war Ansell was the domestic latex condom maker, while Australian and visiting US servicemen in the Pacific were issued condoms under the same VD prevention doctrine as the rest of the Allies. ^11,101,102

Kokusai Rubber, today’s Okamoto, was founded in 1934, and after the war Japan’s refusal to approve the contraceptive pill (a ban that lasted until 1999) left condoms as the national default. By the 1960s Japan used more condoms per head than anywhere on earth, and that demand is why Japanese makers like Okamoto and Sagami still lead the ultra thin race our thinnest comparison tracks. ^11,103,104

Vending machines spread through 1950s America in petrol stations, bars and men’s washrooms, making the condom the first truly anonymous contraceptive purchase. Machines and packets carried the line ‘sold for the prevention of disease only’, a legal fiction everyone saw straight through, and some US states fought machine sales into the 1960s and beyond. ^105,43,72

In May 1960 the US FDA approved Enovid, the first oral contraceptive. For the first time a woman could prevent pregnancy without a man reaching for anything at the moment, and more than a million American women were on it within two years. The condom’s near monopoly on discreet, effective contraception was over. ^107,108

Through the 1960s and 70s the condom fell out of fashion fast as the Pill and then the IUD took over its market. Among contracepting US couples aged 30 to 44, condom use dropped to about 12% by 1976. This is the low point the rest of the story climbs back from. ^52,109

BS 3704, published in 1964, was one of the first national standards written specifically to control condom quality. Pass it and a condom could carry the BSI Kitemark, so whether a condom actually worked became something you could certify rather than just claim. It’s the direct ancestor of today’s ISO 4074 and the provenance thinking behind this site. ^110,111

In June 1965 the US Supreme Court struck down a Connecticut ban on contraceptives, ruling that married couples had a constitutional right to privacy. It cleared away the last state bans on married couples using condoms and opened the ground for open sale and advertising. ^112,113

Seven years later the same court extended that right to unmarried people, after activist William Baird deliberately broke Massachusetts law by handing contraceptive foam to a single 19 year old. From 1972 anyone could buy a condom whatever their marital status, the baseline the modern shop shelf assumes. ^114,115

Akwell Industries, the company behind LifeStyles, patented the ribbed condom in 1972, while Japan was turning out textured novelties like the Yamabuki Wrinkle. Features, ribbed, dotted, coloured, contoured, became a product axis of their own, the same one this site’s feature filter still uses. ^116,117

From April 1974 the reorganised NHS made contraception free to everyone, whatever their age or marital status. Free provision centred on the Pill and the IUD though, so condoms on the NHS stayed limited until AIDS made barrier protection a priority. ^118,119

From the mid 1970s makers started coating condoms with the spermicide nonoxynol-9, and lab tests suggested it could knock out sperm and even HIV in the dish. That promise drove decades of extra-protection marketing. It would not survive real world trials, as you’ll see near the end of this era. ^120,121

On 5 June 1981 the CDC’s weekly report described five young gay men in Los Angeles with a rare pneumonia that only shows up when the immune system has collapsed. It is regarded as the first official report of the disease later named AIDS. Nobody reading it yet knew it would remake the condom into something that saves lives. ^122,123

Australia recorded its first AIDS diagnosis in Sydney in 1982, and what followed set it apart. Under Health Minister Neal Blewett, and with rare bipartisan backing, governments funded affected communities, blunt prevention campaigns, condom distribution and clean needles rather than reaching for blame. Condom promotion sat at the centre of it, and it’s the reason condoms are cheap and unembarrassing in Australia today. ^124,125

Between 1983 and 1984 Luc Montagnier’s team in Paris and Robert Gallo’s in the US isolated the retrovirus behind AIDS, later named HIV. Knowing it was a virus carried in body fluids gave the condom a precise, evidence based job, block the fluid and you block the virus. ^126,127

Four Seasons has traded as an Australian owned condom company since 1984, run by Graham Porter and pitched as the local innovator, early to multiple sizes, glow in the dark novelties and the ultra thin Naked range. Its Naked Larger line is still a fixture of the Australian large-fit market this site catalogues. ^128,129

In 1985 the Prime Minister and the Premiers agreed that minimising harm, not punishing it, would be national drug policy. The next year Dr Alex Wodak set up an initially unlawful needle exchange in Darlinghurst, and community groups handed out clean needles, condoms and safe sex advice together. ^130,131

In October 1986 US Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, a conservative evangelical, released the first Surgeon General’s report on AIDS and bluntly told Americans to use condoms and teach kids about sex early. A trusted conservative saying it did more to break the taboo than any activist could. ^132,133

ACT UP formed in New York in March 1987 after a fiery Larry Kramer speech, and fought with die-ins and blockades of Wall Street and the FDA. It forced governments to treat AIDS as an emergency and pushed frank condom and safe sex education into the open, against loud moral opposition. ^134,135

A month later, at a workshop for Aboriginal health workers in Townsville, Condoman was born, an Indigenous superhero in the red, black and yellow of the Aboriginal flag. Led by Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, his cheerful line, don’t be shame be game, use frenchies, carried safe sex advice without a scrap of fear or judgement. Where the Reaper frightened, Condoman welcomed, and communities right across Australia took him up. ^139,140

As HIV turned condom quality into a matter of life and death, the US FDA began sampling in 1987 and, in the first year alone, recalled around 3 million domestic condoms and rejected some 30 million imported ones. Checking whether a condom actually holds shifted from a nicety to a regulated safety regime, the direct ancestor of the how-do-we-know-it-works provenance this site foregrounds. ^141,52

British television aired its first condom advertising in November 1987, for Richard Branson’s not-for-profit Mates brand, launched to make condoms cheaper and less mortifying to buy. A message that had been unsayable on television was suddenly a public-health duty. ^142,11

In 1988 Koop’s seven page booklet, Understanding AIDS, went to all 107 million American households, the biggest public health mailing the country had ever done. It calmly explained how you can and can’t catch HIV and told people plainly to use condoms, over objections from parts of the Reagan administration. ^133,143

While other states rolled out condom vending machines and needle exchanges, Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland dug in against the condom culture, preferring sanction to safe sex. The machines and open sale only became uncontroversial there in the early 1990s, after the Fitzgerald Inquiry and a change of government. It is the sharpest Australian example of condom access being a live political fight within living memory. ^144,145

Latex allergy went from a curiosity to a recognised clinical problem in the late 1980s, driven by the explosion in glove use after health workers were told to glove up against HIV. A genuine market for latex-free condoms opened up, and it’s why this site’s latex-free grouping exists at all. ^146,147

Glyde was founded in Sydney in 1990 to make condoms without casein, the milk protein used to process most latex, and without harsh chemistry. In 2006 it became the first condom brand certified by The Vegan Society, roughly two decades before vegan turned into a selling point for everyone else. ^148,149

Thailand went national with its 100% Condom Programme in 1991, requiring condoms in all commercial sex and supplying brothels free. Senator Mechai Viravaidya, cheerfully nicknamed Mr Condom, flooded the country with them and stripped away the embarrassment, and condom use in sex work climbed above 90% within a few years. It was the era’s clearest proof that de-stigmatised condom promotion could halt an epidemic. ^150,151

In 1991 a group of New York artists cut and folded the first red ribbons as a sign of solidarity with people living with AIDS, and once Jeremy Irons wore one to the Tony Awards it went everywhere. AIDS awareness turned visual and mainstream, opening the cultural room in which condoms could be talked about openly. ^152,153

In November 1991 Fox became the first US national network to run a paid condom ad, a Trojan spot that aired just ten days after basketball star Magic Johnson revealed he was HIV positive. As in Britain, it took AIDS to finally get condoms advertised on network television. Australian TV stayed far more restrictive, refusing several condom ads classification well beyond this point. ^154,155

The FDA approved the first female, or internal, condom in May 1993, a polyurethane pouch invented by Danish doctor Lasse Hessel. For the first time there was a barrier a woman could control that also guarded against HIV, a genuine expansion of who could start protection. ^156,157

In 1994 Durex Avanti became the first male condom made from polyurethane instead of latex, aimed straight at people allergic to latex and sold on its thinness. It created the non-latex male condom category, though watch the lineage, today’s Avanti products are polyisoprene, a different material again. ^158,159

This is where the 1970s spermicide story ends. Big trials among sex workers found that nonoxynol-9 did nothing to stop HIV and, used often, could raise the risk by damaging delicate tissue, and in 2002 the WHO and a Lancet review said so plainly. It’s a textbook case of a lab promise failing in the real world, exactly the kind of claim a provenance-driven database has to flag rather than repeat. ^160,161

Here’s the fact that explains a whole category. Standard latex condoms can be non vegan because casein, a milk protein, is traditionally used as a processing additive in some latex formulations. Australia’s Glyde, founded in 1990 to make condoms without it, became the first condom brand certified by The Vegan Society in 2006 and says it’s still the only one. ^148,165

In 2006 Jan Vinzenz Krause of the German Institute for Condom Consultancy (Institut fuer Kondomberatung, Singen) built a prototype spray-on condom, inspired by drive-through car washes and spray-on plasters. The penis was inserted into a chamber where nozzles sprayed a coat of fast-drying liquid latex, producing a made-to-measure condom; one cartridge held enough latex for roughly 20 condoms. The 2006 announcement was covered worldwide via Reuters and made the New York Times Magazine 'Year in Ideas' issue, but the product never reached market and development had stopped by 2008. ^166,167,168

Ansell’s LifeStyles brand launched SKYN, the first condom made from synthetic polyisoprene to clear the US FDA. It’s chemically the same polymer as natural rubber minus the proteins that trigger latex allergy, so it finally made latex free feel like latex rather than a stiff polyurethane compromise. And Ansell was still an Australian company at the time, which makes the century’s biggest latex free breakthrough ours. ^169,170,171

The US FDA approved FC2, the female condom rebuilt in synthetic nitrile instead of polyurethane. Nitrile made it roughly 30% cheaper to produce and quieter in use, which kept it affordable for the UN and aid agencies that buy most of them. It’s still effectively the only internal condom in worldwide distribution, and in Australia you’ll find it through sexual health clinics rather than the chemist. ^172,173,174

A University of Manchester team took Gates money to develop a latex and graphene composite condom, thinner and stronger in theory. The materials research was real and published, but no graphene condom has ever been submitted for regulatory approval or sold, whatever the headlines implied. Lab science and a certified ISO 4074 product turn out to be a long way apart. ^178,179

The current edition of the condom standard kept the burst and leak regime, tightened shelf life and packaging rules, and formally recognised that condoms come in genuinely different sizes, adding burst criteria for widths under 45mm and over 65mm. Every declared width in our database is a legally meaningful number because of this document, not a marketing one. ^180,181

Boston’s Global Protection launched myONE Perfect Fit in the US with 60 FDA cleared sizes, 10 lengths by 9 widths, each chosen by measuring yourself against a printable ruler. The range has since settled at 52 sizes, but the point stands, fit matters enough to build a business on. No Australian brand offers anything like it, which is part of why this site exists. ^187,188

The US FDA dropped the female condom from its highest risk device class, put it on the same regulatory footing as male condoms, and renamed the category the single use internal condom. That removed the biggest barrier to new competitors and gave the device a name that covers how people actually use it. Australian clinics increasingly say internal condom too. ^156,189

Boston University researchers published a polymer coating that turns slippery on contact with moisture and stays that way, unlike applied lube which wears off mid use. In a blind touch test 85% of people preferred it. It’s the most credible survivor of the 2013 Gates challenge, though as of 2026 it still hasn’t reached shops. ^190,191

Everyone predicted a lockdown boom in condom demand. The opposite happened. Karex, the world’s largest manufacturer, saw sales fall as much as 40% and posted its first loss since listing, mostly because clinics shut and governments suspended free distribution programs. A huge share of the world’s condoms move through public health channels rather than shops, and 2020 proved it. ^192,193

A WHO report covering more than 242,000 teenagers across 42 countries found condom use at last sex fell from 70% to 61% among boys and 63% to 57% among girls between 2014 and 2022. Australia shows the same drift, with syphilis and gonorrhoea notifications climbing while surveyed condom use among young people falls. The trend everyone assumed only went up is going down. ^197,198

Every condom legally sold here is a Class IIb medical device that must sit on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods and conform to ISO 4074. The TGA also batch tests condoms in its own laboratories, sampling 315 or more per brand for burst and leak results, and tightly controls what packs and ads can say about STI prevention. The ARTG number on the pack is your guarantee the thing was actually tested, and it’s the artg_id field in our database. ^199,200,201

Free condoms flow through state programs and community health organisations rather than one national scheme. NSW Health’s Play Safe program supplies registered youth services 144 free condoms plus lube every month, ACON maps free pick up points across NSW, and equivalents run in most other states through organisations like Thorne Harbour Health. Worth knowing before you pay chemist prices. ^202,203,204