At a recent Bare It All event on June 9, Halle Berry discussed a highly personal journey: her menopause.
Speaking on a panel discussing women’s health with Christina Aguilera, the 58-year-old Oscar-winning actress revealed how her lack of knowledge about menopause led her down an unexpected road of study, healing, and entrepreneurship.
Berry confessed she was taken aback by the start of menopause at the age of 54, adding, “I had no clue I was in menopause at this stage in my life. I was 54 years old, and no doctor had ever hinted that I might go into menopause.
It wasn’t until she started having symptoms, shortly after meeting her lover Van Hunt,
“I was really afraid at that time that I would never enjoy that part of my femininity again and that I had lost that,” Berry told me. “I finally found my person and now the worst joke in the world happened to me.”
Berry described the condition as a wake-up call, not just for her personal health, but also for the disparities in understanding around women’s healthcare.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole of doing my own reconnaissance and trying to figure out, well, if my doctor didn’t recognize this as a symptom of menopause and nobody ever talked to me about menopause, I can only imagine that there are other women, probably millions of women, that know nothing whose doctors know equally nothing,” she told me.
“They serviced my very first needs when I realized that I was in menopause, they helped me get my intimacy back and my sex life,” Berry told us.
“They became very near and dear to me right from the start,” she told me. “And I realized through Colette and Dr. Sarah that we are like-minded and we have many ideas for many more things that we can create together that are science backed, that women actually need.”
During the talk, Berry underlined the need of publicly discussing menopause and breaking the long-standing secrecy surrounding it.
“It takes being bold, talking about it, being loud about it, not being afraid to talk about it, not feeling shame, giving other women permission to talk about it,” she told me.
e. It’s a human rights issue, and we need to fight for that.”
