“It’s not that you stop wanting them,” she said. “It’s that it starts to hurt — so you start avoiding it, and then you lie there wondering what’s wrong with you.” None of us had ever said it out loud. Then my friend Sue put her coffee down and had said it for all of us. I went quiet, because that was me, exactly. The desire was all still there — the dryness was the problem. And I’d spent two years thinking it was just me. Then she told me what she’d found. We’d both done the rounds. Lubricants — she’d lost count, I’d lost count. Moisturisers. A cream the doctor suggested. They all did the same thing: helped for the few minutes they were on, then nothing. Because they sit on the surface. And the surface was never really the problem. Neither of us could take HRT. Some women can’t. Some are told not to. Some try it and it barely helps. And neither of us had ever been told there was something studied that wasn’t a hormone. Here’s what Sue explained, and what finally made sense. After menopause, oestrogen drops and the tissue itself changes — it thins and loses some of its ability to hold moisture. The cells in that tissue are built partly from fats. A lubricant can’t change that. It’s like misting a houseplant’s leaves while the roots stay bone dry. The dryness is on the surface. The change is in the tissue. What she’d started taking was Senora — a daily softgel of sea buckthorn oil. You swallow it like food. Its omega-7-rich fatty acids are absorbed and used to support the lipid-rich cell membranes and mucosal tissue — the layer that’s meant to hold moisture in the first place. Not wetness on top. Support underneath. And not just any sea buckthorn. The omega-7 lives in the fruit — the pulp oil — not the seed. Senora is built around the fruit-oil fraction, which is why a cheaper “sea buckthorn,” often seed oil or an undisclosed blend, may not have done much. And it isn’t a hunch. In a 2014 randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial in Maturitas, 116 postmenopausal women took 3g of sea buckthorn oil daily for three months. They were 3.1 times more likely to improve their vaginal tissue integrity than the women on placebo. Not surface moisture — the integrity of the tissue itself. I’ve been taking it three months now, same as Sue. It wasn’t a switch flipping. It was quieter than that — one evening I realised I wasn’t bracing. The dread went first. And then it was just us again. I’m only writing this because Sue wrote it for me first. If the desire is still there and your body just isn’t keeping up, this is worth understanding properly. I’ve put the study, the dose, and how it works below. P.S. It’s non-hormonal — no oestrogen — which is exactly why it’s worth a look if hormones aren’t an option for you. P.P.S. Three softgels a day. Nothing to apply, nothing to time, no cream living by the bed. P.P.P.S. Give it the full twelve weeks the study used — Senora backs it with a 90-day money-back guarantee, the same window, so the trial’s on them, not you. Individual results vary.
