At the age of 48, perimenopause has hit Rebecca Marsala hard – she’s experienced hot flushes, night sweats, heightened emotions and increased anxiety, heart palpitations, low libido, fatigue, low mood and sudden panic.
Like many women, Rebecca, who runs her own luxury floral design business and lives in Milton Keynes, started looking online for solutions. She also downloaded free apps that offer to track and treat symptoms of menopause.
Instantaneously, the algorithms got to work. Rebecca began seeing increased amounts of menopause related content on her social media feeds, including adverts for products such as skincare and supplements to alleviate the issues. She was even targeted ads for vaginal tightening treatments.
In her exhaustion and desperation, she decided to try some of the products, including supplements, some of which cost £30 for a bottle. A year later, she tallied up that she had spent £1,000 and had, in her words, “gone down a massive rabbit hole”.
“You get something because it’s promised to fix whatever particular issue you have – low energy, aged skin, or poor sleep. The feeling I get is, ‘If I take this, it’s going to fix it,’ – it’s like a marketer’s dream,” she says. “Of course, it doesn’t, because it’s about your whole lifestyle, and obviously, everyone’s body responds to things differently, and everybody’s got different things going on.”
After years of stigma and silence, menopause is now being talked about widely, and an industry of clinics, products and platforms has sprung up with it. This month, the “world’s first menopause-friendly store” opened in London, selling pelvic floor trainers, “inner confidence” supplements and cooling pillows.
But recently, experts have been sounding the alarm that menopausal women are being targeted and exploited by companies, with little evidence for many new products available.
An analysis from consumer watchdog Which? revealed that menopause supplements costing more than £400 a year were no better than a £22 a year supermarket multivitamin. That’s based on the actual ingredients considered most important during perimenopause and menopause – calcium and vitamin D. In a scathing new book on wellness, doctor Xand Van Tulleken was especially dismissive of menopause supplements, calling them “the biggest rip-off of them all”.
Dr Helen Wall, a GP and menopause specialist, says she doesn’t blame women who are perimenopausal and menopausal for being sucked into marketing for supplements – as it happened to her, too.
“I started taking supplements advertised as ‘hormone balancing’, but I didn’t really feel any better. After a while, I actually looked at what the evidence was for some of the herbs and discovered there wasn’t much. In fact, some of the herbs in the supplements weaken estrogen activity,” Wall told The i Paper.
“I wasn’t buying these as a doctor; I was buying these as a perimenopausal, 40-odd, tired working mum of three trying to survive. In the end, I came off those supplements and saw a menopause specialist, went on HRT, and felt miles better.”
While she’d never berate women for turning to supplements, Wall says she doesn’t recommend them because there isn’t the medical evidence to back up their claims.
“There’s a huge difference between products, in terms of purity, too,” she says.
Rebecca is now angry that she was targeted by supplement brands, and that millions of other women going through perimenopause and menopause could be spending money on products with no evidential basis. “Some of them are so broad with small amounts of lots of ingredients in them, claiming to cover all symptoms, but it just isn’t possible,” she says.
“You try so many things at once, and you don’t know what is or isn’t working, then you’re scared to stop taking something in case that’s the thing that is working.”
She also feels concerned about whether the ads she started receiving could be linked to the apps she downloaded to track her symptoms.
A recent study from the Danish app compliance platform Peak Privacy found that 10 menopause apps had sent data to outside companies, including Google and Meta, without the users’ consent. None of the 10 apps let users choose what to share; they had to accept the whole privacy policy, or not use the app.
There have been other cases when women’s health apps have been found to share information about users. In 2025, the period tracking app Flo agreed to pay $8 million (around £6 million) to settle claims that it had violated the privacy of millions of its app users by sharing information about their menstrual health with companies such as Facebook and Google. Google agreed to pay $48 million (around £36 million) in the same case. Meta is currently appealing its $1.1 billion (around £832 million) damages bill.
Rebecca has given up taking supplements. She has started taking HRT, and also made lifestyle changes, such as eating and going to bed earlier, and cutting down on alcohol. She does a daily 10-minute meditation alongside breathing and stretching, and says all the changes are helping her keep her anxiety and moods in check, and get her energy levels back up.
“These are all lifestyle changes I’ve learned from podcasts and people I purposely follow, rather than adverts thrown at me,” says Rebecca. She has decided to try a menopause app called Talia, which costs £3.99 a month and guarantees not to share any user data. It was launched last year by Kate Kirkman, a Cornwall-based photographer who began experiencing menopause symptoms 10 years ago.
Rebecca believes part of the reason women like her are turning to the internet and are easily led into buying unproven remedies is a lack of awareness among the medical profession.
“I don’t think GPs have anywhere near enough training on perimenopause. For example, a GP offered to increase the dose of the HRT I was taking, without realising I was on the maximum dose already,” she says. “Had I not already researched it myself, I could have been double dosing. I have since stopped taking it to try a more natural route for now.”