- Naomi Watts got candid about starting perimenopause at 36 when she was trying to start a family.
- “I went into complete panic, felt very lonely, very much less-than or like some kind of failure,” she recalled.
- Now at 54, she hopes to uplift others going through the transition with her new menopause-catered skincare line, Stripes.
At 54, Naomi Watts looks back at the last 20 years as quite the emotional—and hormonal—rollercoaster. That’s largely thanks to her experience with perimenopause (the years leading up to menopause) and then menopause itself, a journey that totally caught her off guard by beginning at age 36.
None of Watts’ friends—or even her doctors—had talked to her about the change and the fact that it could start in your 30s. “I found myself at 36 and perimenopausal, a word I didn’t even know about, and at the precipice of trying to start a family,” she recalled at The New Pause Symposium in New York City, per People. “So I went into complete panic, felt very lonely, very much less-than or like some kind of failure and what was I going to do? There was no one to talk to, there was no information, basically on my visit to the doctor, who said, ‘Well you’re not getting pregnant ... your bloodwork is indicating that you’re close to menopause,’ so I was freaking out.”
With the help of trial and error treatments, Watts had two children—Sasha, now 15, and Kai, now 13. After Kai was born, the menopause symptoms shifted into full gear.
“I went through massive night sweats, hot flashes and I thought, ‘This is terrible.’ And I would try to test out the community of my friends, and I was sort of met with nervous laughs and shrugging it off,” she recalled. “And I thought, ‘Oh wow no one else is there, I better keep silent,’ and that’s how it was.”
But she knew other women her age had to be going through something similar, and that the stigma attached was keeping them quiet. That’s why, now, at 54, she hopes to start dismantling it with Stripes, a skincare line that caters specifically to menopausal symptoms “from scalp to vag,” she told InStyle. She also started The Hot Spot, an online forum where people can go to find community and share their transition stories.
“Perimenopause is a transitional time, and it’s up and down and up and down, and if you don’t have an outlet or a place to b*tch and moan and cry and laugh and experience all of those feelings with others, it’s going to be a horrible time,” she said at the symposium.
And Watts can speak from experience when she says there’s no feeling like standing strong after reaching the other side. “When you get yourself back, you are actually the most authentic version of yourself because you’re not a victim to your hormones anymore,” she told InStyle. “Once you’re on the other side of menopause, you get to reclaim yourself.”
Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.
