Beautiful Nails and Bourgeois Beauty

  Think of the gut as a long-term relationship partner that’s been quietly co-regulating your mood, immunity, and hormones for most of your life, mostly without you needing to think about it. For years, estrogen has been part of that relationship. Estrogen doesn’t just act on the ovaries or fat tissue. It shapes the gut environment itself. Certain gut bacteria actually respond to estrogen levels , and some bacteria help metabolise and recycle estrogen through what’s called the estrobolome . While estrogen is relatively stable, this system hums along quietly. Mood is more resilient. Inflammation is better controlled. The gut lining stays more robust. Then menopause arrives. As estrogen becomes erratic and then declines, the gut ecosystem feels that loss. The diversity of bacteria often decreases. The species that thrive on fibre and produce calming compounds don’t compete as well anymore, especially if the diet has been restricted over the years. At the same time, stress-respons...

 Imagine a woman’s body as a long-running system that has been quietly, brilliantly adapting across decades. For most of her adult life, estrogen has been one of the key conductors in that system. It doesn’t just deal with reproduction. It keeps multiple sections of the orchestra in time with each other: blood sugar, stress response, sleep, mood, appetite, muscle, and fat storage. While estrogen is present, the system is forgiving. It absorbs mistakes. It recovers quickly. Then perimenopause begins not suddenly, not dramatically, but unevenly. Estrogen doesn’t disappear; it becomes unreliable. Some days it shows up, some days it doesn’t. The body, sensing instability, starts to look for backup systems. One of those backup systems is fat tissue. Fat is not inert storage. It’s hormonally active. Adipose tissue can convert other hormones into small amounts of estrogen. So as ovarian estrogen becomes unpredictable, the body begins to defend a slightly higher level of fat as a biolo...