Something else? Ask Aunt Vadge – bottom left of your screen!
Dear Aunt Vadge,
I’m a 26-year-old, not-sexually-active woman. I’ve noticed three small bumps just under my urethra and above the vaginal opening. They don’t look infected, don’t hurt, and aren’t round – more like a rice grain in shape and size, soft and fleshy and pretty much the same colour as the area.
It’s been a few months; they aren’t getting bigger, but they aren’t going away either. I’m going to see a doctor soon, but I’d like an idea of what it could be, as nothing I looked up seems to fit.
Best,
Bumpy
Age 26, Morocco
Hi there Bumpy,
Without examining you it’s impossible to be certain, but your description – three small, soft, fleshy, rice-grain-shaped bumps the same colour as the surrounding skin, just under the urethra and above the vaginal opening, painless, not infected-looking, unchanged for months, in someone not sexually active – fits the most common and entirely harmless things in that area very well.
Top of the list is vestibular papillomatosis: normal little finger-like projections of the vestibule that are a natural anatomical variant, present in lots of women, not an infection and not anything you did or caught. Small skin tags, or the normal openings of the Skene’s glands sitting just beside the urethra, can look like this too.
The fact that they don’t hurt, aren’t growing, are the same colour as everything around them, and you’re not sexually active all point away from anything worrying – genital warts, for instance, usually come from skin-to-skin sexual contact and tend to change or multiply.
Still, getting your doctor to take a quick look, as you’re planning, is exactly the right move: a clinician can confirm a normal variant in seconds and put your mind fully at rest, and you can ask specifically whether it’s vestibular papillomatosis.
In the meantime, don’t pick at them or try to treat them – they sound like normal anatomy, and the only thing that turns normal anatomy into a problem is interfering with it.
Warmest regards,
Aunt Vadge
This is general information, not a substitute for personalised medical advice.
