"In 1965, a brand called Oracon became the first to include placebo pills in its packaging. Oracon's most documented motivation behind the first placebo pills was to help women ensure that they were taking their pills correctly: Inactive pills meant that women now took a pill every single day, thus putting them on a more routine schedule and making it easier to notice if they'd missed one. Of course, the pill's engineers could have just as easily added an extra week of active pills so that women were still taking one a day. That, however, would have meant that women no longer bled once a month, and the 60s weren't quite ready for that. This formula—three weeks of hormonal pills, followed by one withdrawal week, complete with the requisite bleeding—remained unchanged for over 40 years. Then, in 2003, the drug company Barr released Seasonale. This was the first oral contraceptive to give women the option of foregoing monthly withdrawal bleeding; it contained 84 hormone pills and seven placebo pills. Women using this method would ex-perience withdrawal bleeding just four times a year—or once per season, as the drug name intimated. Four years later, the FDA approved Lybrel, the first oral contraceptive to offer continuous active pills with no breaks for withdrawal bleeding whatsoever."