Formulating for Women's Wellness

Karin Linnewiel Hermoni describes perimenopause as a highly volatile life stage, marked by symptoms and hormone levels that fluctuate daily, even hourly, rather than following a predictable pattern. This contrasts with menopause, where estrogen is consistently low and formulations focus on boosting it.

For perimenopause, the goal instead is helping the body return to balance or "center," which looks different for every woman. She draws a parallel to brain adaptogens: just as those help the brain adapt to stress, perimenopause formulations should help the body become more resilient and adaptable to constant hormonal shifts, rather than targeting one fixed deficiency.

A transcript can be found below.

Karin Linnewiel Hermoni: Perimenopause is a distinct phase of life, which is mostly about volatility. And you mentioned it—it’s many symptoms, but it's also “I'm different every day and sometimes every hour.”

So unlike formulating for, let's say, menopause, where we know that the estrogen level is going to be pretty low, and we want to increase it or help our body find strategies to increase it. In perimenopause, we are much focused on bringing our body back to center. So that means that, it looks different for every woman. It means thinking in a way of how do we, in the same way we are thinking about adaptogens for brain, we need to help our body adapt and be more resilient to changes.