Naomi Watts’ brand Stripes Beauty has created a new ‘Hotter Than Ever’ campaign to celebrate and empower women throughout midlife and everything that comes with it. Her brand – which is dedicated to providing and promoting holistic menopause solutions – offers products that cater to women’s bodies, ‘from scalp to vag[ina]’.

She started a quest to normalise more open conversations around our health and wellness experience, when so much of women’s health is trivialised or not spoken about. The actress also wants to take on the concept of self care, ensuring that women in midlife are making time for this.

Watts has explained that the campaign was born ‘out of wanting just to shake that old style of, ‘Oh, this is a private matter. These should be secrets that we hold close to our chest,”’.

‘We shouldn’t have to suffer in silence,’ she says. ‘I started sharing my story little by little and began connecting with women who wanted to talk, but just felt afraid to. We all want to feel like we belong to something.’

The campaign will exist both online and on large-scale posters throughout New York that she hopes will ‘spark conversation, drive awareness, and redefine what it means to thrive in midlife’.

The actor hopes that this movement will help to redefine the midlife age, which is often disempowering for women in particular, to an era of reawakening.

‘Our minds, our experience, our sense of self, all of these things cumulatively add up to a bolder, wiser version of yourself, which makes you hotter than ever,’ she told People. ‘And there’s a play on words of course, because yes, we are fanning ourselves as we go into hot flashes. But it’s also a time we should feel good about ourselves, hold our heads high and not fear and dread menopause like we have been taught by society and previous generations.’

Watts wants to combat the same she felt when she began her own menopause journey ahead of schedule. ‘I went into menopause or perimenopause super early and felt a lot of shame and no real sense of ways to communicate, not with my friends, my mother or even doctors,’ she says, adding that she hopes to create a community for women going through the same thing.

‘Women in this stage – perimenopause and beyond – have often felt left out. When our hormones stop functioning the way they used to, it’s like we become redundant, expected to disappear. There’s just a whole lot of negative messaging, which feels so out of date now. And as we know, we’re more than our fertility. We are not invisible.’ She describes feeling inspired to speak out after her skin started to change in the throes of menopause.

‘My skin was very agitated and irritable, and I was on camera all the time,’ Watts recalls. ‘So I started researching skin and how as your hormones deplete, you become drier. And then I started connecting the dots going, this is a bunch of women who are probably going to be sharing these symptoms, so let’s try and come up with some problem solving here.”

Watts also namechecked some inspiring women who she felt were aligned with her mission, including author Miranda July, who wrote All Fours – a novel about a woman navigating an open marriage and new passions that manifest during mid-life. Others included Australian film and television producer Bruna Papandrea, human rights activist Jodie Patterson, comedian Chelsea Handler and more.

She also describes drawing motivation from the women she is close to. ‘My family is a team of matriarchs, starting with my grandmother,’ Watts says. ‘My mum has two sisters. They’re all very meaningful forces in my life.’

She adds that she hopes to be the same force for her own children, Sasha and Kai, aged 17 and 16 respectively.

‘I think authenticity is the most important thing, but it’s really hard to get to that place without lived experience. And that takes decades,” Watts says. ‘Our children, they’re so impressionable. I think failure is a big part of it as well, knowing that mistakes will be made and failures will take place, but you can still carry on past those. They’re just lessons. Over time, you become unapologetically and authentically yourself.’

Above all, Watts describes feeling, and being, ‘hotter than ever’, and focusing on the things that bring her joy. ‘One of my kids just graduated high school and the other has one year left, so I’m trying to savor the time,’ she says. ‘Summer usually means a little bit of a trip – maybe a hop, skip and a jump to Europe. I have a house in Montauk and that’s nice. Just smelling the coastal air, swimming, cooking, entertaining and really unwinding.’

We’re a huge fan of Watts’ take on life, from scalp to vagina.