For 50 percent of the world’s population, it’s as inevitable as death and taxes, but until very recently it was even more unspeakable. The mere word—menopause—shush! And the experience? Let’s just say the details were barely shared between mothers and daughters, much less doctors and patients. Now what used to be ominously euphemized as the Change of Life is getting a rebrand. Gwyneth is even posting about it on Instagram.
Thanks to a groundswell of female techpreneurs, women’s health advocates, and Gen Xers not content with being written off as a Sex and the City punchline, menopause is very much the word on everyone’s lips. A cursory Google search will yield apps, telehealth platforms, and brands—so many brands—touting everything from herbal remedies to temperature regulating sleepwear to lotions targeting skin both above and (well) below the neck. The end of the period is turning out to be an exclamation mark when it comes to investment opportunities. The menopause market is estimated to be a potential $600 billion, with 1 billion women worldwide poised to be in the life phase by 2025. And here’s a thought to make us all feel old: Millennials, now ticking past 40, are entering that era of hormonal capriciousness we now know to call perimenopause.
If the movement has a celebrity face, it’s a pretty one. Naomi Watts, luminous and Oscar- nominated, has determinedly set out to destigmatize—hell, even glamorize—menopause. After finding that the early-onset night sweats and dry skin that bedeviled her in her forties echoed the confusion and isolation she endured when struggling with fertility in her thirties, she decided that she was not going to let other women suffer the same fate. “I fantasized about writing a handbook for women, but I’m not a writer,” she says. “I thought, How can we make this fun? How can we make it not seem like the end of your life, which is what we’ve been brainwashed to believe? Like, ‘Go sit in the corner with your knitting needles.’ If you put me there I might stab somebody.”
Watts’s brand, Stripes, which debuts in October with products ranging from a probiotic supplement to a scalp serum, was developed with Bay Area clean beauty biotech company Amyris to be, Watts says, “a one-stop shop for all the things that are going to come up at this point in your life, so you won’t have to go one place for your hair stuff and another for your vaginal support.” While other launches are focusing on giving women easier access to prescription hormone therapy (most notably the telehealth startups Alloy, co-founded by former Marie Claire editor in chief Anne Fulenwider, and Evernow, which raised $28.5 million earlier this year from investors including Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz, and Drew Barrymore), Watts wants Stripes’s primary mission to be communication, with a robust educational website and peer-to-peer conversations.
Plunging estrogen can trigger a panoply of symptoms ranging from hot flashes to brain fog, headaches to weight gain—and because everyone experiences the transition differently, the experience can be bewildering. “Suddenly you feel awful and you don’t know why,” Watts says. “And for so long there was no one to ask. It’s like we signed a contract for a code of silence, and generations of women have had to just suck it up and cope. We absolutely must crack that open and throw a ladder down to younger generations.”
Making sure a topic that has been underresearched, underfunded, and chronically misunder stood finally gets its moment in the spotlight is going to take some work, even with a surge of money (and a cohort of fiftysomethings who, unlike their mothers, find TMI to be NBD) furthering the cause. Still, we may at last be witnessing the demise of a taboo. Menopause could even be something—believe it or not—to look forward to. “Personally, the fact that my hormones are no longer raging is making me more centered and more in touch with how to make decisions for myself,” Watts says. “It’s actually a very special time. You shouldn’t shrink and hide and feel redundant. You should feel empowered and proud, like your most authentic self. You’ve earned the right to feel your best.”
This story appears in the October 2022 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
April Long writes about beauty, wellness, and luxury skincare for Town & Country.
