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Labubus, Dubai chocolate, Sydney Sweeney—these are just a few, let’s say, concepts that everyone on the internet collectively learned recently, and, as is our wont, proceeded to drive into the ground. It’s a familiar pattern, a topic quickly going from unknown to ubiquitous to exhausting, and it usually plays out with cultural trends and ephemera—which is why it’s so odd that I’m currently wondering if it might also apply to a phase of reproductive health.
“Perimenopause” is the term for the years leading up to menopause, a time when women may experience symptoms like changes in their menstrual cycles, moods, sleep, and more, symptoms that, traditionally, haven’t been widely spoken about (and can vary considerably from person to person). I know I brought up Labubus, but that doesn’t mean I think perimenopause is a trend—its existence is a scientific fact, not something that can be switched out for another keychain. And yet, over the last few years perimenopause has undeniably become strangely … popular? As in, if I would ever be so crass as to dub something the Labubu of women’s health concepts, perimenopause would have to be it.
How did we get here, to the point where almost every day, there’s a new trend piece or study about perimenopause, with the Washington Post designing quizzes to test your peri-IQ and McSweeney’s running its own, less earnest quizzes? Last year, there was even a hot perimenopause novel. Tech and other types of companies have been trying to stake a claim in the perimenopause space as well, which has resulted in the founding of telehealth and vitamin startups and various Goop-y products like oils, gels, or a wearable tracker specifically for perimenopause symptoms.
It’s curious, this inescapability. During the first few months of the pandemic in 2020, I remember getting a kick out of a TikTok of comedian Jordan Firstman pretending to be a triumphant publicist representing banana bread (“We did it, bitch, the plan fucking worked!”), and lately I keep having the silly thought that it’s like perimenopause hired banana bread’s publicist. It was just everywhere all of a sudden, like Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, or Timothée Chalamet in an Oscar campaign. Perimenopause saw a marked spike in awareness and interest around 2022, climbing sharply in recent years and to a high in the past couple of months, according to Google. There were high-profile advocacy campaigns, celebrity pushes by figures like Queen Latifah and Drew Barrymore, and the subsequent money rush. Perimenopause obviously did not hire one particularly effective publicist, but it did experience a comms person’s dream scenario of “earned media” seemingly all at once.
However this public relations blitz came together, is it possible it worked too well? I’m just wondering how many more times I’ll encounter the sentiment that “nobody tells you” about perimenopause now that so many somebodies have. And do I personally even need to be worried about perimenopause? If all this awareness of it is just giving women in their 20s and 30s one more thing to worry about, what’s the good in that?
I voiced some of these anxieties to Lauren Tetenbaum, a New York–based psychotherapist specializing in women’s life transitions and the author of the book Millennial Menopause: Preparing for Perimenopause, Menopause, and Life’s Next Period, and she reframed some of them for me. She pointed out that many women treat perimenopause, which typically begins in their late 30s or early 40s and can last for a decade, as not so much an additional thing to worry about but a new way to worry about things you might already be worrying about, such as aging and fertility. In her experience working with and speaking to women, “They associate menopause or perimenopause with aging. They’ll say things like, ‘Oh, I’m nowhere near that.’ I just heard that the other day, and the woman was 48. It’s like, ‘You are though.’ It’s a life phase, it’s not a disease.”
Monica Christmas, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Chicago and associate medical director for the Menopause Society, told me that as her patients’ awareness of perimenopause has increased, so have misconceptions. “What I’ve noticed more recently is that the information isn’t correct, and that’s almost worse than no information at all,” she said. “Everything isn’t perimenopause. Right now, everybody believes every symptom that they have, it has to be perimenopause.”
Robin Noble, the chief medical officer at the nonprofit organization Let’s Talk Menopause, acknowledged that the increasing prominence of perimenopause can be a “double-edged sword”: “Being clued into that can be healthy, but it can also increase people’s anxieties.”
Christmas said she sometimes fields requests from people wondering if they can simply opt out of perimenopause altogether. “I’m getting a lot of people that are in their 30s that just want to skip it. That’s not possible. I always think, ‘So are you asking me what the antidote to aging is?’ ” She said she asks those patients to explain what in particular they’re afraid of, so they can try to address that.
So it seems possible peak perimenopause is not here yet, and there are still plenty more people to reach. Still, there’s reason to be wary of the so-called menopause gold rush, with its lack of regulation and high risk for exploitation. Christmas said she worries about companies creating hysteria and undermining doctors. She also is concerned with the way algorithms can push some of these products and ideas. “You may not even realize that in between the cute pet videos that you look at, you also are getting inundated with people talking about perimenopause and in ways that may not be very helpful, like you need this estrogen cream to put on your face, or you need these probiotics.”
As delusional as it may be, I understand the patients Christmas mentioned who are hoping they’ll magically be exempt from the whole thing. As Emma Rosenblum put it in an Elle essay, “knowing that we’re entering this process, and all that goes with it, doesn’t exactly feel great.” But ultimately, it does seem better to have a slightly better understanding of what the lead-up to menopause might look like. Aging may not always feel like a gift, but I wouldn’t trade it, not even for a 24-karat gold Labubu.
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