BALANCING Act

Convinced ESTROGEN is to blame for your weight gain? CORTISOL for your puffy face? HORMONES have become the BOGEYMAN du jour, with a booming crop of pseudo-treatments promising to REGULATE ... EVERYTHING.

- CHERYL WISCHHOVER

What ur bod is telling you about your hormones!” reads the text overlay on a TikTok of a gorgeous young woman with long blond hair standing in a barn.

She slaps at her inner thighs and abdomen, mentioning boxiness and bloating, neither of which is visible on her. “Everybody’s got a little bit of a hormone imbalance going on,” she says. “But if you have a drastic hormone imbalance, it can be a living hell.” She pulls a teal-colored drink into the frame, saying a “super holistic friend” told her to drink it for its “hormonal-balancing vitamins and minerals.” You can, obviously, buy it through her link.

The concept of hormone imbalance, manifesting in shouty captions and too many hashtags about perimenopause or cortisol face or estrogen dominance, is all over social media. These invisible chemicals that control everything in our bodies, and that a lot of people don’t fully understand, have become the bogeyman du jour. And like generations of snake-oil salespeople before them, armchair endocrinologists are happy to share the supposed cure. Just comment “CORTISOL” or “SEED CYCLING” and they'll send you a link to learn more.

But how did we even get to a place where buying TikTok-famous drinks with taglines like “Cortisol can kiss our ashwagandha” became normal? Trust in doctors is the lowest it’s been since the mid-1990s, according to a 2025 Gallup poll, with health care increasingly inaccessible to a large swath of people. Covid ushered in a deluge of wellness influencers. Now, 67 percent of people think that having personal experience with a health issue makes someone a “legitimate health expert,” according to a 2025 global survey by communications firm Edelman.

“It’s tricky, it's confusing, and I don’t blame these women for landing in the laps of these people who are just out to make money,’ says Lauren Streicher, a physician and clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.