HAVE WE REACHED PEAK
Now that women’s midlife health issues are no longer a taboo subject, businesses have been
Are you a menopausal woman? Roll up, roll up and step this way because have we got merch for you! First up, a fetching baseball cap (€23) with ‘Hormonal’ emblazoned across it from Wile, a menopause supplements start-up backed by tennis champion Serena Williams. It’s nothing if not a conversation starter in the supermarket queue.
Next, a lovely moisturiser – no, not to hydrate your face, for dryness down there.
It’s called, um, Vag of Honor (pictured opposite), it’s €45 and it’s the bestseller at Stripes, actress Naomi Watts’s range of ‘holistic menopause solutions that work’.
Finally, may I direct you to Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s online wellbeing emporium, which is brimming with potions, lotions and ‘sexual wellness routines’ (best not ask) to aid menopause symptoms, including a herbal supplement called – wait for it – Madame Ovary (opposite), just €80 for a one-month supply. I do hope you’ve got your credit card handy.
Has the market for menopause products reached saturation point? It certainly feels like it. Wherever you turn, there’s a product designed to help women tackle hot flushes, night sweats, dry skin, brain fog, joint pain, anxiety and so on; many of which are eagerly endorsed by celebrities. Midlife loss of libido is proving especially lucrative for the meno marketeers – we’re now seeing the sex toy repackaged as an essential self-care accessory. Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson, co-creative director of Maude, which majors in stylish vibrators, even declared, ‘Sexual wellness is a fundamental human right,’ at the brand’s 2020 launch. Oddly I couldn’t find that on the UN’s official list, which focuses on more boring ones like the right to life and liberty.
But sexual wellness is undeniably big business – worth €54.6 billion in 2021, the industry is forecast to hit €82.6 billion by 2028, according to research firm The Insight Partners. Meanwhile, the Global Wellness Summit predicts the menopause industry overall will be worth a whopping €575 billion by 2025. Ker-ching!
Penneys now sells pyjamas made from temperature-regulating, moisture-wicking fabrics to help with night sweats. Even the humble cup of tea has had a meno makeover, with Twinings launching its Superblends Menopause Cool Moments tea bags, with peach, sage, lemon balm, honeybush (no, me neither) and vitamin B6, late last year. At €4.10 for 20 tea bags, they cost 75c more than Twinings’s regular fruit teas.
‘I’m loath to say that the Twinings tea is the nadir of menopause marketing because I suspect there are far murkier depths to be plumbed,’ sighs Sam Baker, creator of The Shift, a book and podcast aimed at women aged over 40. When Baker started going through perimenopause a decade ago ‘you only had to say that word out loud and everyone started backing away from you as if you were contagious’.
How things change. When Baker’s book, subtitled How I (Lost And) Found Myself After 40, came out in 2020, it helped start a new and much-needed conversation about, and between, a vast swathe of women experiencing this life phase who had felt hitherto ignored. By 2021 those voices were getting louder and that year Davina McCall’s Channel 4 documentary Sex, Myths and the Menopause drew an audience of more than two million and booted midlife women’s health firmly into the mainstream. I’ve lost count of the number of chats I’ve had recently with casual acquaintances at parties,
‘WE WANT TO BE SEEN BUT INSTEAD GET PATRONISED AND FLEECED’