The Shaky Promise of Putting Estrogen on Your Face

22.10.2026, 16:19 allure.com

At 45, Keenya Kelly gets more compliments on her skin than ever. But when she began experiencing perimenopause symptoms in her 30s, Kelly says her typically oily and plump skin became “almost like a Brillo pad overnight.” A friend told her to try putting estrogen-infused moisturizer on her face. So, every night for the past year, the video marketing strategist from Houston has religiously included estrogen cream, which she buys from the telehealth platform Musely, in her skin-care regimen. “People ask me what I’ve done to my face, and I say ‘It’s just estrogen.’”

Everybody seems to be talking about perimenopause and menopause, and that’s in many ways a good thing. Increased awareness about this often-stigmatized life phase, and the sometimes debilitating symptoms that can come with it, has made many women feel less alone in these mid-life trenches, where temperatures often spike suddenly and sleep can be hard to come by. It’s also helped them understand the range of treatment options, and advocate for themselves. But there comes a moment when we move from public health literacy (good!) to “wow, this is a really great market opportunity” (predatory?). A recent Wired report on the “perimenopause industrial complex” found that four leading telehealth startups in the space saw a 490% increase in web traffic from 2023 to 2026. Most of those companies do not accept insurance, charging up to $200 per month for custom hormone therapy in a variety of forms.

One of those forms: Skin-care creams with estrogen, purported to increase collagen and improve skin elasticity. The hormone-laced salves seem to be creeping toward a peak moment, with looksmaxxing and menopause influencers alike swearing that these formulas transformed their faces. Especially if you are a woman with a birthdate before 1990, a scroll through social media might be enough to convince you that slathering estrogen on your skin is commonplace. However, in our reporting, it was tough to find anyone outside of the professional social media creator career track who wanted to chat about their experience doing so. So first things first: Whatever the algorithm would have you believe, not all mid-life women with glowy skin have added estrogen-infused products to their skin-care routine.

Those who have made the addition are availing themselves of one of two types of estrogen commonly used in topical creams: estradiol and estriol. Estradiol is the “stronger” version, meaning it binds more strongly to estrogen receptors and generally produces more potent effects than estriol, the “weaker” one. Vaginal estrogen cream is a well-studied treatment for vaginal dryness, typically formulated with 0.01% estradiol, and frequently prescribed by gynecologists for women during the menopause transition. Estrogen skin-care creams are more commonly formulated with estriol (usually at 0.3%) and will always also include typical skin-care ingredients, such as hyaluronic acid.

But experts say more estrogen isn’t always better. Some of the doctors who spoke to Allure for this story voiced concerns that it comes with an elevated cancer risk. One recent review of existing clinical data on topical estrogen for skin care found “most controlled trials failing to demonstrate reproducible improvements in visible aging” while "safety data remain inconclusive.” Ultimately, the study's authors advised clinicians to “use caution” when deciding whether to recommend these estrogen-infused skin-care creams to their patients.

Nevertheless, it’s not hard to get some if you want it. Some dermatologists prescribe estrogen skin cream off-label via compounding pharmacies, or you can use a telemedicine platform like Musely, Alloy, or Midi to order it yourself. But should you?

Estrogen works hard for us. It doesn’t only regulate our menstrual cycles, it also affects our hearts, our bones, our brains, and, yes, our skin, says Jacqueline Marecheau, MD, chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Episcopal Health Services in New York City. It’s no wonder that perimenopause, when estrogen ebbs and flows before periods stop for good, can wreak so much physical and mental havoc.

On the epidermal front, estrogen helps maintain the thickness and elasticity that make our skin look firm and bouncy. The hormone is one of the things that lights a fire under our fibroblasts (the cells that create collagen), and it also helps hold on to the collagen we already have, board-certified dermatologist Mona Gohara, MD, an associate clinical professor of dermatology at Yale School of Medicine, has explained to Allure. That’s why estrogen and collagen tend to wane in tandem: “There’s evidence that collagen levels start to decline very gradually even before menopause occurs,” says Emily Lebowitz, MD, a board-certified dermatologist in New York City. This decrease goes from gradual to sharper dropoff as you enter perimenopause. “Once this transition of menopause is complete, a woman may have lost up to 60 to 70 percent of the collagen that she had in her youth,” New York City-based board-certified dermatologist Melissa Levin, MD, previously told Allure. As estrogen and collagen decline, elasticity decreases, contributing to thinner, looser, and more wrinkled skin. Dryness, as Kelly experienced, is another common side effect—as skin structure changes, it can lose its ability to hold water.

This dryness often affects the vagina. One of the most common perimenopause symptoms is genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM), which can cause thinning vaginal skin, vaginal dryness, and pain with sex. The primary treatment is menopausal hormone therapy (MHT), often referred to as hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which can come in the form of an estrogen patch, a pill, and/or a topical cream applied directly to the vagina (extra lube can help, too). While vaginal tissue and facial skin aren’t the same thing, they both contain estrogen receptors, which means hormonal shifts can affect them.

Forty-eight-year-old Laura Pucker, a Delray Beach, Florida-based content creator and digital marketing professional, started noticing significant changes to her face and neck when she entered perimenopause in her early 40s. She’d always had combination skin, but as her estrogen levels plummeted, it became dry and flaky, and she noticed sagging around her jawline and crepiness on her neck. “It got progressively worse as I got [further] into perimenopause,” she says.

Board-certified dermatologist Corinne Erickson, MD, has given this common group of hair- and skin-related symptoms a name: pilocutaneous syndrome of menopause (PSM). She hopes giving doctors this framework will help even non-menopause specialists identify when a patient’s complaint could be an early sign of perimenopause, and hopefully guide them to treatment earlier. “When you have a name, you have a stronger ability to do research,” she says. “You have a framework and a foundation to talk to patients.” She’s published her findings online as a whitepaper and has submitted it for peer-reviewed publication.

Estrogen facial creams could, in theory, be one of the treatments doctors armed with that framework might recommend. The idea behind estrogen facial creams is similar to hormone therapy (but make it skin care). Those aforementioned estrogen receptors mean that, theoretically, applying estriol to the face could address these issues by stimulating the production of collagen, says Viktoryia Kazlouskaya, MD, a board-certified dermatologist and hair loss specialist at Dermatology Circle in New York City. “But in reality, we don’t have that much data yet,” she says. As a result, doctors have differing opinions about whether topical estrogen is a safe—or even effective—option for tackling menopause-related skin changes.

There are two main (and opposing) concerns about this new spate of estrogen skin-care products. One, that you might be absorbing more estrogen than is considered safe into your bloodstream. Two, that you might not be absorbing any estrogen at all from the cream, rendering it a useless-but-expensive addition to an already effective formula. (It’s almost definitely useless to anyone who isn’t in perimenopause yet, Dr. Erickson says: “The estrogen needs to be replacing something that’s lost for it to have benefit.”)

While estrogen has many protective effects—including reducing the risk of osteoporosis and heart disease—the conversation around hormone therapy is nuanced. Taking too much estrogen for too long, for example, has been linked to an increased risk of breast cancer, although the incidence is rare and similar to the risk profile of other commonly-prescribed drugs. “There’s still the question of how much absorption is considered safe,” says Dr. Marecheau.

Hormone therapy—including the estrogen patch, pill, and vaginal cream—is FDA-approved for managing symptoms of perimenopause and menopause. Estrogen, which Dr. Kazlouskaya says the FDA classifies as a drug even if it’s being used in facial skin care, is not approved for treating wrinkles or other age-related skin conditions. The women who are using these estrogen creams are all getting them through prescription at a compounding pharmacy; by law, compounded medications are not FDA-approved and do not have to go through any pre-market safety testing. According to a 2025 paper published in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology, “peer-reviewed and FDA-reviewed data on [topical estriol cream’s] safety and efficacy in facial applications remain limited.”

Hormone therapy typically contains estradiol, while estrogen skin-care creams are usually formulated with the weaker version, estriol. According to Dr. Lebowitz, one could extrapolate that if the stronger vaginal cream doesn’t cause systemic absorption of estrogen, the weaker facial cream may not, either. “But the academic answer is we still need more studies,” she says.

Unlike with the FDA-approved hormone therapy products—which have been studied to determine dosing, absorption, and system