Menopause is experienced by half of the population and potentially affects 100% of it. Despite this, it’s yet another one of those areas of female health that has been invisible for years, even centuries. Thankfully, all that’s beginning to change now. From new workplace policies to Netflix shows such as Grace and Frankie, companies, culture and the media are finally paying attention to older women. However, more needs to be done.

We need a full-scale attitude change towards the menopause: building awareness around the symptoms and educating from a young age about what it is and what women will expect to experience, the negatives and the positives. The likes of Mariella Frostrup and Davina McCall have done a brilliant job of driving awareness and films such as Good Luck to You, Leo Grande with Emma Thompson are shining a spotlight on the emergence of women owning their experience.

The beauty-fication of menopause

According to a recent report, approximately 1.1 billion women throughout the world will be postmenopausal by 2025. Additionally, 50 million women are approaching or currently in menopause and dealing with symptoms such as hot flushes, dry skin, and sleep issues.

From Womaness’ portfolio including a number of supplements, skincare products, feminine care solutions, sexual health products to Vichy’s Meno5 Neovadiol range, menopause is now being considered - for skincare at least, but the category is starting to boom. Beauty and cosmetic brands are furiously releasing products aimed at women in their 40s and 50s experiencing symptoms of the menopause, a type of customer that has been largely ignored by the industry to date.

However, beauty brands are challenged in finding the right tone of voice when communicating to midlife women. It must be through an appropriate and empowering tone of voice that doesn’t use patronising or stigmatising language. The cosmetics space fails to fairly represent menopausal women, so the offered products have to cater to the evolving requirements of midlife skin, hair and body. And marketing must hit the right tone too!

From ‘flawless skin’ and ‘anti-ageing’ messaging and imagery, the beauty industry must shift to embrace those beauty features, as they portray a life brilliantly lived. For most, the menopause is a new chapter in women’s lives that should be celebrated, so empowerment would be a more winning brand strategy than hiding one’s wrinkles.

Giving control back to the women

Did you know every minute there are 70,000 health enquiries on Google? The need for information and the importance for it to be credible could not be greater. With self-care comes self-education. And organisations face an increased pressure to ensure patients and caregivers receive accurate and appropriate guidance when taking their health into their own hands, in particular through the digital space.

One of the biggest risks to health through menopause is through the cardio-vascular system with 1 in 3 older women dying from cardio-vascular disease or stroke. Awareness and the implementation of a healthy lifestyle and diet can help to avoid that outcome, but little seems to be known about this threat to half the global population. As women, we live a third of our lives in some form of menopause (pre, peri or menopause itself), which makes you wonder why R&D teams and brands aren’t working harder to support the physical and mental impact this has on us.

With women struggling to get the required help from GPs, who cannot recognise most of the menopause symptoms, the healthcare industry should help women get back control of their lives. A prime example of this is the Balance app developed by Dr Louise Newson, which provides expert content, a symptom tracker and personalised health reports. Its goal is to empower women, trans and non-binary people across the world to take control of their health and bodies. To bring the community together, in-app experiments provide simple tasks that users can try, based on things other people have found to help relieve their menopause symptoms, and share their personal experiences. Something that the traditional healthcare sector is failing to do currently.