NAOMI WATTS

Hollywood wrote her off so, at 53, she built a business from the silence.

Over the course of her career, Naomi Watts has outrun tsunamis on screen and faced down King Kong. She has been nominated for Academy Awards, graced every major magazine cover, and built one of the most respected bodies of work in contemporary cinema. None of it, she has said, prepared her for early menopause.

The story begins not at 53, when Stripes launched, but at 36, when Watts visited her doctor hoping to start a family. Instead, she was told she was close to menopause. She nearly fell out of her chair. "I felt ashamed and like it was the end of my dream of becoming a mother, the end of my acting career, the end of, well, everything." She called her mother for answers. The response was as illuminating as it was devastating. "These were the conversations I never had with you," her mother told her, "because my mother never had them with me." Three generations of women, moving through the same experience in complete silence, each one left to piece together what was happening to her body without map. Watts was warned explicitly, by people in the industry that she would never work again if she admitted to being menopausal or even perimenopausal. "Hollywood's lovely term for such women," she wrote in her book, "was 'unfuckable.'"

Stripes Beauty launched in 2022, founded on a mission to de-stigmatise menopause and fill the head-to-toe product gap that Watts had spent years navigating alone — science-backed solutions across skincare, haircare, body care, supplements, and intimate wellness. The product names alone announced the brand's intentions with precision: Vag of Honor. The Full Monty. Oh My Glide. The Dream Date. This was not a brand tiptoeing around the subject. It was a brand that had decided, with some force, that tiptoeing was exactly what had caused the problem in the first place.

The early years were not without turbulence. Stripes' parent company, biotech firm Amyris, went bankrupt. Watts bought her brand back at auction for $500,000. The conviction was vindicated. L Catterton, the private equity firm backed by LVMH with $37 billion in investments, — acquired Stripes, having identified not a bankrupt business model but a high-end brand inside a failing, misaligned parent company. They brought in former Revlon CEO Debra Perelman as executive chairman and former L'Oréal executive Cara Kamenev as president. The plan, as Watts put it simply, "was always to scale." Since acquisition, Stripes has grown by three times.

Women have approached her at public events with tears in their eyes, she has said, thanking her for giving them the language to talk to their husbands, their families, themselves. "I reject the notion that this marks the end of one's life," Watts has said. "Just because it's the end of one's reproductive life doesn't mean you're invisible or irrelevant. In fact, I wanted this to be a reminder that it's the beginning of a new point."

The woman Hollywood called ‘unfuckable’ is now a CNBC Changemaker, a published author, and the founder of one of the fastest-growing wellness brands.

The Vag of Honor is the product that has become Stripes' most talked-about, its most searched, and — at Credo Beauty — described by their VP of Brands as filling a gap they'd never been able to address before. A hydrating gel specifically formulated for external vaginal dryness, earning consistent praise for supporting intimate moisture and comfort, it is the product that says the thing nobody in the beauty industry had been willing to say: that estrogen loss affects the whole body, not just the face, and that women deserve targeted, elegant, science-backed solutions for all of it. It is also the product Watts keeps on her bathroom shelf in plain sight — and was, memorably, the subject of an unexpectedly illuminating conversation with her teenage children.

The Full Monty Body Oil is the sensory entry point — formulated with vitamin C to boost radiance and squalane to combat the full-body dryness that menopause accelerates, with a scent that every reviewer describes as genuinely extraordinary. It is the product that makes the whole Stripes philosophy tangible: this is luxury, and it is science, and it is for your entire body, not just the square inches your face cream covers. The Crown Pleaser Hair Mask addresses the concern that almost no haircare brand had acknowledged before Stripes made it unavoidable: that hormonal changes affect the hair with the same force they affect the skin, and that the thinning, dryness and loss of lustre that arrive with menopause require a targeted response, not a generic deep conditioner. For sleep — the symptom that Watts describes as the one that most quietly dismantles quality of life — The Dream Date supplement is the brand's most recent hero. Formulated with melatonin, GABA, red clover, magnesium and ashwagandha, it addresses the hormonal disruption of sleep from multiple angles simultaneously.

For skin the Dew As I Do Hydrating Gel brings the same ethos the brand applies to intimate wellness to the face: hyaluronic acid, squalane and ectoine, working together to replace the hydration that falling oestrogen systematically removes. Ectoine is an amino acid found in organisms that survive in extreme, hostile environments. It feels appropriate. Stripes was built by a woman who knows something about surviving those.

Stripes Beauty is available at stripesbeauty.com International shipping available to the UK