Penélope Cruz Just Taught Us More About Perimenopause Than Our Doctors Did
Plus, a full list of sneaky symptoms your doctor probably never mentioned.
Last week, a woman on Reddit discovered why her shoulder had been in agony for eight months. Soon enough, she found some answers. However, she didn’t find out from her doctor. She didn’t find out from a specialist. She found out thanks to Penélope Cruz on a beauty brand’s YouTube channel.
“TIL that my frozen shoulder (that I’ve had for eight months) is likely due to perimenopause,” she wrote. “Not Penélope Cruz being better educated in the menopause than the myriad of male doctors I’ve seen over the past five years.”
She was not alone. When Cruz and her The Invite co-star Olivia Wilde sat down for Allure’s Truth Serum series this week, they talked openly about perimenopause, and specifically about a symptom most women have never heard of: frozen shoulder, also known as adhesive capsulitis. According to the Mayo Clinic, it is a multi-year condition in which the movement of one shoulder becomes limited and painful.
According to Midi Health, it may occur during perimenopause when falling estrogen levels lead to shoulder stiffness and restricted movement. According to countless women in the comments section, it has been agonizing. And nobody told them why.
This is what happens when celebrities say the things the medical system hasn’t bothered to explain.
What Penélope Actually Said
Cruz, 52, and Wilde, 42, are co-stars in The Invite, the A24 film directed by Wilde that premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival to a standing ovation and opened in theaters on June 26. Cruz plays Pína, a therapist and sexologist. One of Pína’s scenes, in which she talks openly about perimenopause, was not in the original script. Cruz put it there herself.
“I wanted to bring that to her,” Cruz explained to Entertainment Weekly. “If she is going to talk about sex, she has to talk about this.”
On the Allure set, Wilde asked Cruz to share the part of perimenopause she thinks is least discussed publicly. Cruz didn’t hedge.
“It can last 10, 12 years,” she said. “It can start as early as 40. The ups and downs can be crazy.” She described being 41 when her doctor told her that her hormones would be “doing this crazy dance for the next 10 or 12 years.” Her first reaction: “I thought it was a really bad joke. I thought it was not possible to handle that.”
She then described her own experience in precise, clinical terms: she develops ovarian cysts almost every month, cysts that spike estrogen levels so dramatically that labs have flagged the results as errors. “You can go from a number 30 of estrogen to a number 500,” she said. “They would look at that and say, ‘No, this is a mistake from the lab, let’s repeat the test.’ And it was right.”
“People have to know,” she said, “because you have to prepare yourself.”
She also credited bioidentical hormones, used in hormone replacement therapy to treat perimenopause and menopause symptoms, for helping her manage. “God bless bioidentical hormones,” she said.
The Frozen Shoulder Heard Around the Internet
It was Wilde who brought up frozen shoulder during the Allure conversation. Cruz had shared the symptom with her while researching Pína’s role, knowledge she credited to board-certified OB-GYN Dr. Mary Claire Haver.
As many, Wilde said she now thinks about frozen shoulder constantly. “I’m just waiting for my shoulder to freeze,” she laughed.
The internet was not laughing. Comment sections filled with women connecting dots they had never been given the chance to connect. “I’m nine months into mine and had no idea until now as well,” one person wrote on Reddit. “The doctor and I even discussed how our elderly mothers have experienced this. I knew about hot flashes and night sweats, but not this. It has been agonizing at times.”
Others wrote about their mothers, who had considered shoulder surgery without ever being told that perimenopause might be the cause.
Speaking to Tyla, Dr. Ravina Bhanot described frozen shoulder as an “under-recognized perimenopause symptom,” explaining that falling estrogen is thought to increase inflammation and stiffness around joints, with shoulders particularly vulnerable in women around ages 50 to 60. Studies suggest that hormone replacement therapy can also lower the risk of frozen shoulder in post-menopausal women, according to research cited by Duke Health. And the prognosis, Dr. Bhanot clarified, is good: “It’s very treatable with physiotherapy and anti-inflammatories, and it does resolve.”
That information exists. It simply was not reaching people through the channels it should have.
This Is Bigger Than a Beauty Segment
Cruz has been making this argument for years. In a 2019 interview with Tatler magazine, she said: “There are too many taboos surrounding women’s bodies, and I think it equals a big lack of respect. Words like ‘period’, ‘post-partum depression’, ‘menopause’. Even today, those words, you bring them up at a dinner table, everybody gets nervous.”
She sharpened that argument in Entertainment Weekly this week: “It’s shocking that over decades, we’ve stuck to the same information about how women’s bodies work. Look at funding for investigation into any illness that affects only women — we don’t get even half the investment. It is a level of control or suppression.”
“Without health, we have nothing,” she said. “You talk about real equality? Why don’t we start with health?”
She is not the only one saying it. Two weeks ago, Alanis Morissette, also 52, called menopause her “truth serum” in an interview with The Sunday Times. “The procreative imperative keeps me ooey-gooey, then when that goes away I’m in my authentic truth,” she said. When asked why she would start hormone replacement therapy if stopping later could bring symptoms back, she had one answer: “Who’s going off it?!”
The regulatory landscape is also slowly catching up. In November 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the FDA had begun removing “black box” warnings from menopausal hormone therapy products, according to AARP. Those warnings had discouraged generations of women from pursuing treatment. Hormone therapy is not for everyone. AARP notes it is generally not recommended for people with a history of blood clots, breast cancer, heart attack, or certain other conditions. But for many women, the option had been effectively taken off the table.
What Cruz did on a beauty brand’s YouTube channel was not glamorous. It was just necessary.
The Symptoms We Are Adding to Our List
The National Menopause Foundation has identified 36 known symptoms of perimenopause and menopause, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Hot flashes and night sweats are on that list. So is everything below — and according to menopause specialist Dr. Zubina Mawji, MD, about 20% of patients present with symptoms that are never immediately connected to perimenopause at all.
“Women oftentimes know when they’re experiencing the most obvious signs,” Dr. Mawji told the Cleveland Clinic. “But it’s only when we start delving into other possible symptoms that they realize it could all be related.”
Here is what they might not realize is related, per the Cleveland Clinic and UCLA Health:
Skin, hair, and nails: Sudden acne recurrence (sometimes teenage-level breakouts), hair thinning and loss, brittle nails, dry and itchy skin, and unexpected body odor.
Mood and mental health: New or worsening anxiety, depression (in approximately 20% to 30% of women, according to the Cleveland Clinic), and panic disorder, which develops or worsens around menopause in an estimated 10% of women.
Gut and digestion: Constipation, diarrhea, bloating, heartburn, and acid reflux, all connected to estrogen receptors in the gastrointestinal tract, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Energy and sleep: Fatigue, insomnia, and night sweats that wake you up for months at a time.
Nervous system and senses: Difficulty concentrating, dizziness, “body zaps” (brief electric shock sensations), tingling in hands and feet, and dry eyes, which affect up to 60% of perimenopausal women, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
Joints and muscles: Joint pain, which affects up to 60% of women in menopause according to the National Menopause Foundation, muscle tension, headaches, breast pain, and frozen shoulder.
Heart: Heart palpitations, which affect up to 42% of perimenopausal women according to a review cited by the Cleveland Clinic, and changes to cholesterol levels as estrogen’s protective effects decline.
Everything else: New or worsened allergies, urinary urgency and incontinence, increased UTIs, loss of libido, and elevated risk of osteoporosis (10% to 20% of bone loss occurs in the first five years of menopause, according to the Cleveland Clinic).
UCLA Health ob/gyn Dr. Rajita Patil, director of UCLA Health’s Comprehensive Menopause Care program, put the mandate plainly: “Don’t suffer silently. Recognize what’s going on and then advocate for the care you need.”