Founder Q&A
I spent the last 20 years as a board-certified reproductive acupuncturist and helped over 10,000 women improve their periods and improve their fertility. I spent my whole career obsessing over the value of the menstrual cycle as a barometer of women's overall health.
What inspired you to start Brazen?
I wrote an article in Goop magazine called, What Your Period Can Tell You About Your Health that ended up being extremely popular. Several hundred women wrote to me after the article was published that basically said the same thing.
“I'm 26 years old. I'm not in a relationship. I don't want to have a baby. I'm not touching shit called Conceivable (that was the name of my first company) and I heard you know how to fix periods. I'm really sick every month and I need you. Can you help me?"
When I found out that more than 82% of women were reporting significant and life interrupting menstrual pain, I was shocked. I'm a world-renowned expert in women's health and I didn't even know this. I thought to myself, how can we be in the middle of a woman's movement when the majority of women and people with periods are really sick every single month and no one is talking about it, and more importantly no one is doing anything about it. I happened to be very good at fixing PMS, cramping and pretty much every other menstrual problems, so I decided to take on the challenge at building solutions to liberate people from the shame and suffering of menstruation.
Why is this so important to you?
We have been gaslighted since the beginning of time about what it means to be a person with a period and what the experience of periods should be. Nearly every person with a period I have talked to tells me that suffering with your period is normal. They don’t really believe that anything can change that and that suffering is the lot that we must bear as women and menstruators.
You say the history of the menstrual cycle is holding women back from having access to power. What do you mean by that?
I was a linguist in my first career so after realizing that more than 80% of women were suffering from significant PMS and menstrual pain I wanted to use language to figure out how we got here. I wanted to understand how we got this implicit agreement that it was okay for all of us to suffer. I decided to read everything that was ever written about menstruation since the beginning of written time. it turns out that in the first 1500 years there was nothing written about women and menstruation. The first publicly written mention of menstruation is in the Book of Leviticus in the Bible, it said something to the effect of:
“that thing as vile as a menstruating woman or the devil. (SHIT) Then in the third Century Aristotle said, "women are the affair to your species because they menstruate, they are feeble. In reproduction, the female only contributes to soil so that the seed can thrive. Only the seed contains the spirit and the intellect."
When I read that I understood why women struggle so fiercely with self-acceptance and self-love. Until we transform that it mentality, I think we will struggle to have access to the power both within and outside of ourselves.
There are several products mostly for PMS and a few for cramping. What is different about Brazen?
There are a number of PMS gummies and vitamins on the market. They are excellent to help support your health if you actually have one of those nutritional deficiencies and you don’t want to just use food to correct them. Personally, they don’t make sense to me because you basically need B vitamins, Calcium and Magnesium to have a great period. These are easy to get from food.
On the other hand, Brazen is completely different. First, the formulas were built by extremely seasoned reproductive acupuncturists with over 35 years of combined clinical experience exclusively working with 10s of thousands of people with period and fertility issues.