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Marvelous Mrs. Menopause is an annual evening of menopause conversations in New York City, co-hosted by Caire Beauty and Let's Talk Menopause. The fifth annual event took place on October 15, 2026, at Luminary, 1204 Broadway, with panels on friendship, bone health and menopause at work.
I want to tell you about a room.
On October 15th we filled Luminary in New York for the fifth annual Marvelous Mrs. Menopause, co-hosted with Let's Talk Menopause. Women came straight from work with their coats still on, carrying the particular kind of tired that has its own look to it.
Allison Davis, a Luminary board member and founder of Sales Done Differently, opened the night and set the tone for everything that came after. She pointed out that we were hosting a conversation about menopause in a room built for ambitious women, because nothing quite says peak earning years like your brain announcing that you can only work three days a week without consulting you.
The room laughed the way women laugh when a thing is funny and also true.
Our emcee, Katie Fogarty, host of the A Certain Age podcast and a Let's Talk Menopause board member, reminded us that five years ago this conversation lived in a group chat. Now there are menopause books on the bestseller list and there has been a congressional hearing. We are not whispering anymore.
Here is what actually happened.
The night opened with Jenn Sherman, Peloton's original cycling instructor, and content creator Pam Sunshine, in a conversation moderated by Lindsay Pinchuk, founder of Dear FoundHer. Jenn and Pam have been best friends for more than forty years, and they got there in the least romantic way possible.
"I hated her when I first met her," Jenn said. Then, before anyone could decide whether to laugh: "It's not about where you start, it's about where you finish."
Forty years later they have walked each other down the aisle, had babies at the same time, and are now, as Jenn put it, going through menopause together. Except they are not going through the same menopause at all.
Pam has had hot flashes for nine years. Nine. She travels with a fan. Her husband makes her a glass of ice water every night and leaves it beside the bed like a stamina cup. She dresses in layers and she will not wear silk, because of the sweat stains, and she said all of this with the cheerfulness of a woman describing her commute.
"This wasn't gonna take me down," she said. "And I was very clear about that."
Jenn, meanwhile, got almost nothing. No hot flashes. Her period went haywire and then it simply stopped. She said she got gypped, which got a laugh, and then she said the sentence that I hear more than any other from Caire customers:
"How come the things that always worked so well for me before are not working as well anymore?"
That is the whole thing, isn't it. Not a symptom you can name. A slow, unaccountable sense that your own body has changed the rules and did not send you the memo.
My favorite part of the panel was the reversal. Pam, the one living with nine years of hot flashes, was fine. Jenn, the one with no symptoms, was the one losing sleep over it. "She was more freaked out," Pam said. "I'd just say, oh dear Lord, please make this not happen to her, because she won't be able to handle it."
Then Jenn said the thing that stopped the room.
She has been a fitness professional her entire adult life. She was Peloton's first cycling hire. She works out every day and she fuels her body properly and she has done everything right by every measure anyone ever gave her. And she had just gotten a bone density scan back.
"This girl is not in osteopenia anywhere," she said. "This girl is in osteoporosis everywhere."
She said it was the first time she had ever said it out loud into a microphone. And then: "That hit me like a ton of bricks, even more than the menopause thing."
I have been thinking about that for two weeks. If a woman who has spent thirty years in a gym can be blindsided by her own bones, the rest of us are not going to feel it coming either.
What she has done about it is the useful part. She stopped chasing cardio, which for a cardio queen is a kind of grief. She lifts now. Not to look a certain way. "I wanna be able to get up off the floor," she said. "I wanna be able to take a vacation when I'm 70 and still walk around and do all the things."
Their advice, in their own words, was not about products. Jenn said shrink your circle to the people who actually cheer for you, and cut the ones who do not. Pam, who collects these like a greatest hits album, calls that addition by subtraction. She also offered the single best Sunny-ism of the night: "It's not being selfish, it's having self."
And her hot take, after nine years of hot flashes and no plans to be quiet about any of it: buy the shoes, eat the cake, take the trip.
If panel one was the story, panel two was the reckoning. Dr. Kameelah Phillips, an OB/GYN, menopause specialist and founder of Calla Women's Health; Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein, an associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Duke Sports Medicine; and Daniel Stransky, a personal trainer and strength coach, in a panel moderated by Katie Fogarty.
Dr. Phillips opened with eleven words. "If you have bones, you should be worried."
She gave the clearest explanation of osteopenia I have ever heard, and she did it by refusing to use the word. Think of it as pre-diabetes, she said. Pre-diabetes gets your attention. You change something. Osteoporosis, where there are actual holes in the bone, is diabetes: medication, real change, a different level of seriousness. We have all been trained to take one of those seriously and shrug at the other.
Then Dr. Wittstein took away the comfortable assumption underneath all of it. We think of bone loss as something that happens after menopause. It is not. The acceleration starts about two years before your final period, because one of estrogen's quieter jobs is restraining the cells that break bone down. Take estrogen away and the breakdown runs ahead of the rebuilding. And most of the bone you will ever have was built before you were nineteen.
So by the time anyone mentions it to you, the conversation is already late. (We cover prevention and treatment in more depth in Bone Loss After Menopause.)
Which brings me to the number that made me put my pen down. Many doctors were trained to order a bone scan at sixty-five. Dr. Phillips said the obvious thing out loud: by sixty-five, she already has osteoporosis. We are screening for a condition after it arrives.
She also mentioned, almost in passing, that she had just gotten her own twenty-six-year-old daughter's calcium and vitamin D numbers back, and that they were in the trash. A menopause specialist. Her own daughter. If that is the state of things in that house, it is the state of things in ours.
Dr. Wittstein did something I did not expect from an orthopedic surgeon at a menopause event. She pushed back on her own industry's favorite advice.
Everyone over fifty is now being told to lift heavy. She is not against it. But she made the point that some of us have a meniscus tear, or a rotator cuff that will not forgive us, or arthritis that makes a loaded squat a bad idea, and that telling every woman to lift heavy is not actually good medicine. Moderate intensity strength training still builds bone. "I don't want people to be discouraged," she said, "because there are people who really can't, and that's okay."
Then she gave the most accessible instruction of the night. Heel drops. Rise onto your toes, drop onto your heels, ten sets of thirty. Or, if you want it even simpler, hop off the bottom step instead of stepping down, every time you come downstairs. That impact is a signal to the bone. You can start tonight, in your kitchen, for free.
She also warned us, with the weariness of a woman who has seen it too many times, about walking a big dog in New York City. The dog sees something. You do not let go. She sees the wrist in her office the following week.
Daniel's contribution was the mechanics. The signal your bone is waiting for is tension, and tension lives in the last few reps, the ones where the movement slows down whether you want it to or not. Multi-joint movements. A push, a pull, a squat, a hinge. Add balance work, he said, because the thing you do not want is to find out about your bone density by falling.
On supplements the panel was refreshingly unexcited. Get calcium from food where you can. Check your vitamin D once a year and supplement only if you are low. Magnesium from seeds and greens. The data on K2 is still evolving. Creatine will not build bone directly, but it helps you build the muscle that loads the bone, which gets you there sideways.
And Dr. Phillips, who had admitted her own bias as a menopause specialist before anyone could accuse her of hiding it, made the point we tend to forget: we talk about hormone therapy for hot flashes and night sweats, and we skip right past bone.
Her closing line was the one I wrote down twice. Eat for longevity. Then: "You are the most important woman in your family. You deserve to move your body for your life."
None of this is medical advice from me. It is what was said in a room. Take it to your own doctor, and take it soon.
The last panel was about work, and it is the one that made me angry in a way I could use.
The moderator, Kacy Fleming, is an organizational psychologist and the founder and CEO of The Fuchsia Tent. She co-led Menopause at Work: From Echo Chamber to Mainstream Practice, a national study with the Society for Women's Health Research. More than 1,100 US employees responded, four in ten of them men, a quarter frontline workers, more than half non-white. Not a survey of twelve executives in a conference room.
Kacy shared that ninety-three percent of employees said they would use support for menopause if it existed. Between 50 and 73 percent already had workplace benefits that could help, yet only 9.9 percent said their employer offered menopause support.
Eighty-three percent said they would be comfortable responding if a colleague raised menopause at work. Men included.
And then: fifty-three percent of women with symptoms said they would tell a manager. Twenty-one percent have. Forty-nine percent said they would tell HR. Six percent have.
Read those last two lines again, slowly. The goodwill is in the room. The disclosure is not. We are all standing around waiting for someone else to go first.
Kamili Wilson, founder and CEO of Claret Circle, went first, on stage, and I do not think she was planning to.
Her first perimenopause symptom at forty-three was not moodiness. It was rage. She described walking through her workplace having violent fantasies, particularly about the men who liked to mansplain, and the room laughed and then stopped laughing, because of what she said next.
It terrified her. She is a Black woman who had been warned early in her career to watch out for the angry Black woman trope, and who had spent years managing against it. And here she was, actually enraged, walking down a corridor where everyone else appeared to be having an ordinary Tuesday.
So she assumed it was her. She went home and, in true Gen X fashion, she Googled her symptoms, and she pieced it together herself.
She also told us that her OBGYN of twenty years, a doctor she trusted, looked at her at forty-three and told her she was too young to be going through perimenopause. (Forty-three is well within the usual range for perimenopause, which we explain in Perimenopause vs Menopause.)
She tried to build what was missing inside her own company. "They weren't ready for it," she said, "and unfortunately they're still not, so that's why I have two and a half jobs."
I have rarely heard a senior executive say something that honest in public.
Hanneke Willenborg, CEO of OLLY, told a version of the same story from the other side of the desk. She told her general practitioner she was moody. The doctor picked up her pad and started writing. "What are you prescribing?" she asked. "Antidepressants."
She was careful about this, and I want to be careful too: she was not attacking her doctor, who meant well, and she was not dismissing antidepressants, which help many women. The problem was that it was the only script in the drawer.
She also said the thing about work that I have not been able to shake. In thirty years in the workforce, she said, for the first twenty-five she needed to show up as a strong man. "Sometimes we wear so many masks that we don't know if it's the mask anymore."
And then: it is so comfortable to post on LinkedIn about your business results. It is so uncomfortable to say that you forget every stinking thing, that you are exhausted, that you have no patience left.
Her company now has a menopause policy. She pointed out the gap that policy was built to close: we have fertility benefits, maternity benefits, paternity benefits, beautifully constructed support through every phase of building a family, and then it simply stops. As though women stop existing at work once they are done giving birth.
Kim Hart, co-founder and president of MiDOViA, who trains employers on exactly this, added the detail that makes policies real or useless. Her own company had a menopause policy while she was going through it. Her manager had never been trained on it. She was afraid to raise it with him because she already knew her performance was slipping. A policy nobody is trained on is a document, not a benefit. "You may as well not have them," she said.
What closes the gap, all three of them agreed, is unglamorous: a written policy, trained managers, and benefits explained in language a tired person can understand on a bad day.
Three things.
Your menopause is not your friend's menopause. Two women who have known each other for forty years sat on a stage and described completely different bodies. If she sailed through and you are drowning, nothing has gone wrong with you.
What you cannot feel still counts. You do not feel bone leaving. You do not feel collagen leaving. They are running on the same hormonal clock, and that is exactly why we built Caire for hormone-depleted skin instead of selling you another cream that promises to turn back time.
And saying it out loud is most of the work. A fitness professional said osteoporosis into a microphone. An executive said rage. A chief executive said I forget every stinking thing. Every single time, the room went quiet and then it breathed.
That is why we do this night. That is why we will do it again.
Thank you to Let's Talk Menopause and its co-founder Samara Daly, to Luminary for the room, to every woman on those panels, and to every one of you who came straight from work and stayed until the end.
What should next year cover? Email us at care@cairebeauty.com. I read every message.
Event photography by Hannah Turner-Harts Photography. See the full 2026 photo gallery, plus photos from every Marvelous Mrs. Menopause since 2022.
Marvelous Mrs. Menopause is an annual evening of panels on menopause and midlife health, co-hosted in New York City by Caire Beauty and Let's Talk Menopause since 2022. The fifth annual event was held October 15, 2026, at Luminary.
Bone loss accelerates roughly two years before a woman's final period and continues at an accelerated rate for several years after. At Marvelous Mrs. Menopause 2026, Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery at Duke Sports Medicine, explained that falling estrogen stops restraining the cells that break bone down, so breakdown outpaces rebuilding.
Osteopenia is lower-than-normal bone density, and osteoporosis is bone loss severe enough to make fractures likely. Dr. Kameelah Phillips, an OB/GYN and founder of Calla Women's Health, compared them to pre-diabetes and diabetes: osteopenia is the warning that should make you change something, and osteoporosis usually means medication and a different level of seriousness.
A DEXA scan, which measures bone mineral density, is the standard test used to diagnose osteoporosis. Clinicians often pair it with FRAX, a tool that estimates a person's ten-year risk of a major fracture.
Many doctors were trained to order a first bone density scan at 65, but Dr. Kameelah Phillips told the 2026 audience that by 65 many women already have osteoporosis. When to get your first scan depends on your own risk factors, so ask your clinician about it at your next visit rather than waiting.
Most women say they would, but few actually do: 53 percent of women with symptoms said they would tell a manager and 21 percent have, while 49 percent said they would tell HR and only 6 percent have. Kacy Fleming of The Fuchsia Tent shared those figures from her national study with the Society for Women's Health Research, and the panel agreed that written policies and trained managers are what make telling safer.
Yes. Bone responds to mechanical load, so strength training and impact work signal bone to rebuild, and strength coach Daniel Stransky noted the signal is strongest in the last few slow, hard reps. Not everyone can lift heavy, and Dr. Jocelyn Wittstein stressed that moderate-intensity strength training and simple impact moves like heel drops still help.
Caire Beauty is now on QVC every month. Co-founder Lorrie King on what the milestone means, and where the brand started.
