Salma Hayek has revealed one of the most visibly obvious menopause symptoms – the enlargement of her breasts.
The actress, who started going through the menopause in her mid-40s, said that her chest ‘just kept growing, many, many sizes,’ and that she doesn’t blame anyone for thinking she had had a boob job.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard star, 54, shared her personal experience with menopause during an appearance on Facebook series Red Table Talk, hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, Jada’s mother Adrianne Banfield-Norris and daughter Willow Smith.
Salma recalled the list of symptoms she was asked about when taking a test to confirm if she’d begun her menopause, calling the questions ‘terrifying’.
‘They were asking me things like: “Are your ears growing and there’s hair coming out of them? Are you growing a moustache and a beard? Are you easily irritable? Are you crying for no reason? Are you gaining a lot of weight really fast that doesn’t go away no matter what you do? Are you shrinking?”’
The NHS website describes the menopause as a natural part of ageing that tends to occur between the ages of 45 and 55, when a woman’s oestrogen levels decline, she stops having periods and can no longer become pregnant naturally.
Symptoms include hot flushes, anxiety, low mood and vaginal dryness.
The actress then revealed she’d been asked about vaginal dryness and joked about the query, given the list of other symptoms they had quizzed her on.
She explained: ‘I thought to myself, it doesn’t matter if you have hair coming out of your ears and nose and a moustache and a beard, and you’re shrinking, and you’re getting big, and you’re in a bad mood all day, but crying at the same time.
‘Nobody’s coming near your vagina! Nobody’s gonna be coming near that thing! Makes no difference!’
Explaining how some women experience an increase in breast size when they put on weight, when they’re pregnant and when they breastfeed, Salma added menopause to that list, labelling herself as ‘one of those women that it happened [to] in every single step’.
Addressing the fact that her bigger boobs had been noticed, she said: ‘A lot of people say that I had breast augmentation. I don’t blame them.
‘My boobs were smaller, so was the rest of my body. But they have just kept growing, many, many sizes.’
She was also open about the health consequences of this growth, revealing how she was ‘really suffering’ from back pain.
However, back pain or not, Salma was still very keen to put herself forward to do all her own stunts for her latest action comedy flick The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard.
Speaking to Metro.co.uk, director Patrick Williams revealed he had to ‘wear my safety hat, first and foremost’, saying: ‘We have incredible stunt people and stunt doubles on standby to take the real scary hits.’
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