Becca Fisher

Menopause skin...

I'm a functional medicine doctor. Menopause gave me hot flashes AND took my skin. Here's what nobody in conventional medicine mentions. That photo was taken at 2:47 in the afternoon on a Thursday in July. Not the middle of the night. Not after a workout. Two forty-seven in the afternoon. In my own bedroom. With a mini fan pointed at my face because the heat wave inside my own body had been going for eleven minutes and the air conditioning in the house was set to 68 degrees and none of that mattered at all. I posted it because I needed someone to tell me it wasn't just me. But the comment I wasn't expecting was the one from a woman named Lisa who wrote — "The hot flashes are awful but has anyone else noticed their skin is just... different now? Like it stopped being mine?" I sat with my phone for a long time after I read that. Because yes. Yes. Exactly that. My name is Dr. Michelle Carr. I have been practicing functional medicine for fourteen years. Before that I did seven years of conventional internal medicine. I have spent the better part of two decades helping women navigate perimenopause and menopause. I know the hot flashes. I know the sleep disruption. I know the mood shifts and the brain fog and the joint aches and the fatigue that sits differently from ordinary tired. I have explained all of it to hundreds of patients. What I had not fully appreciated — until it happened to my own face — was what estrogen decline does specifically to the structural collagen of the skin. I am 53 years old. I went through perimenopause starting at 49. By 51 I was in the thick of it. The hot flashes were the loudest part. Three to five a day. Sometimes waking at 2am with the sheets soaked. The fan became a permanent fixture on my nightstand and then on my desk and eventually in my bag. But underneath all of that — Quietly. Something was happening to my face. My neck. My jaw. My arms. A texture change. A softening of definition that I had always had. A quality to the skin in photographs that I kept trying to attribute to lighting or angles before I finally admitted I was doing what I tell my patients never to do. Explaining something away instead of investigating it. I knew the mechanism abstractly. Every physician knows that estrogen stimulates collagen-producing fibroblasts. We know estrogen declines in menopause. We know collagen production slows. But sitting in an exam room explaining lab values and hormone panels there is a gap between knowing that collagen production slows and understanding what that actually looks like on a face in a bathroom mirror at 53. What it looks like is this. The jaw that has defined a face for fifty years begins to soften at the edges. The neck develops a texture that appears not from expression but from the skin losing its internal scaffolding. The cheeks have a faint hollowness that wasn't there before. The arms show a crepey quality in afternoon light that the brain keeps trying to blame on something else. And here is what I have to say clearly as someone who has spent fourteen years in functional medicine. The conventional approach to this is topicals. Retinol. Peptide serums. Radiofrequency. Fillers when the topicals stop being enough. And those things can help with the visible surface result of the collapse. But they do not address the collapse itself. The collapse is happening two layers beneath the surface. The fibroblasts that produce collagen are receiving less estrogen stimulation. Collagen is breaking down at two to three times the normal aging rate. In the first five years after significant estrogen decline up to thirty percent of total skin collagen can be lost. Thirty percent. In five years. No retinol addresses that. No radiofrequency session addresses that. They address the surface presentation of a structural problem. I needed to address the structure. And here is what I have also had to say clearly — to myself, as a physician standing in her own bathroom looking at her own face: I had been trained to think about collagen in incomplete terms. Most physicians think about collagen the way most supplements deliver it. Types I and III from a bovine source. Two types. The skin requires five. Under the accelerated collagen breakdown that estrogen decline creates all five types deplete simultaneously. Not gradually, the way normal aging works. Simultaneously. In months. Type I — the primary structural collagen of the dermis. Type II — cartilage and connective tissue support, also affected by hormonal shifts. Type III — skin elasticity and the vascular matrix. Type V — the collagen that regulates the formation of the other collagen fibers. Type X — the deeper membrane layers that form the foundation beneath the dermis. All five. Depleting together. And the standard supplement — single-source bovine, Types I and III — addresses two of the five failing systems while three continue to collapse. There is also the vitamin C problem. Collagen synthesis requires vitamin C as a non-negotiable cofactor. Specifically dual-form vitamin C — both water-soluble ascorbic acid and fat-soluble ascorbyl palmitate — to reach collagen synthesis across different cellular environments. Without both forms the synthesis pathway cannot complete. The collagen peptides being consumed cannot be converted into structural collagen. The body flushes them. Daily. Without building anything. I had taken collagen supplements before the perimenopause years. A powder. Single source. No vitamin C cofactor built in. I thought I was doing something good for my skin. Standing in my bathroom at 53 looking at my neck I understood for the first time that I had been addressing one of five collapsing systems with a formula missing the one compound needed to make even that one system work. I spent three weeks going through the research I had been too busy with patients to read properly. The mechanism has a name. The Estrogen-Collagen Collapse. And the formula that addresses it exists. All five collagen types from four natural sources. Bovine grass-fed for Types I and III. Chicken bone broth for Type II. Marine fish for Type V. Eggshell membrane for Type X. Dual-form vitamin C built directly in. Not a separate supplement. Built in. So every time the collagen is consumed the synthesis cofactor is present and the pathway can complete. Internal hyaluronic acid at 55 milligrams. The moisture reservoir the skin maintains from the inside. Also depleted under estrogen decline. Also rarely addressed by conventional approaches. Biotin at 2,500 micrograms. For the hair thinning that runs alongside the collagen collapse under hormonal decline. Three capsules in the morning. Clean label. Third-party tested. No powder. No mixing. I started Lumine Beauty Collagen four months ago. I want to tell you what I found as a physician who started this with clinical skepticism about whether a supplement could meaningfully move the needle on a structural hormonal collapse. Week 2 — nothing visible. Expected. The mechanism requires time. Week 3 — I examined my neck in the mirror the way I examine it every morning. The progression had stopped. After eighteen months of watching it change month by month it had stopped changing. As a clinician I noted it and continued. Week 4 — a colleague at the clinic. She looked at me across the hallway between patients and said — Michelle, something is different about your face today. She is a physician. She notices things clinically, not socially. She was not being kind. She was being accurate. Week 6 — the neck. The horizontal lines that had appeared across the throat had visibly reduced. The jaw had a quality of definition returning. The arms showed a different texture in the afternoon light I had been using to track them. Week 8 — I pulled out the photo from July. The fan selfie. I held my phone next to the mirror. The distance was visible. Not transformed. Not the face from 45. But the direction had changed. And the direction is everything. Month 3 — my husband. He is a cardiologist. He is not a man who comments on appearance. He looked at me over the kitchen counter one morning while I was making coffee and said — you look good. Just that. I asked him what he meant. He said — your face. It looks better than it did six months ago. He didn't know what I was taking. I hadn't told him because I wanted the observation to be uncontaminated. A cardiologist who doesn't comment on appearance said it unprompted. That was data. Here is what I want to say to every woman reading this who has been dealing with the hot flashes and the sleep and the mood and all of it — and who has also been quietly watching something change in the mirror that nobody has named for them. The hot flashes are the loudest part of menopause. The skin collapse is the quietest. It doesn't announce itself. It creeps. A softening here. A texture change there. A quality in photographs that the brain keeps trying to attribute to lighting. Until one day a woman named Lisa comments on a photo and says has anyone else noticed their skin stopped being theirs. And the answer is yes. And the answer has a name. The Estrogen-Collagen Collapse. And the formula that addresses all five failing systems simultaneously exists. Why not give the body what it has been asking for. Because something in there has always deserved the full picture. Not just the hot flash management. The skin too. 📢 EDIT: So many messages after that post. The formula is Lumine Beauty Collagen. All five collagen types from four natural sources. Dual-form vitamin C built in so the synthesis pathway completes. Internal hyaluronic acid at 55mg. Biotin. Three capsules daily. No powder. No mixing. Third-party tested. Clean label. 60-day money-back guarantee — every capsule, then decide. Link: https://lumineorganics.com/pages/collagenperimenopause And to the woman who finds this on Facebook or in a perimenopause group somewhere — The hot flashes are real. The skin collapse is real. Both have the same root cause. Only one of them gets talked about. Now both have been talked about. Because something in there has always deserved the complete picture.