AshLeean Rafalli Ben

I'm a thirty-something working mum, two kids, full-time job, and I drink a bottle of Pinot Grigio every night. I have done since lockdown. I'm not an alcoholic and I'm not going to any meeting — but I am awake at 3:33am every single night with my heart pounding and I have had enough. I'm forty-three and I am turning into someone I do not recognise in the bathroom mirror. The first glass goes in at 5pm while I'm cooking pasta for the kids. By 8pm I'm onto the second bottle and pretending the first one was my husband's, which it wasn't because he's working late. My face is puffy in the mornings. My weekends are written off by 9pm Friday. I cancelled a hen do last summer because I knew I couldn't manage three days of measured drinking. I went to my GP and she asked me how many units a week. I lied. She told me to try cutting down by 25%. The whole conversation took six minutes. Nobody in this country is going to help you unless you call yourself something you're not. I have tried everything. Annie Grace's book. Dry January twice. The Try Dry app. The Sunnyside app. Alcohol-free wine, which made me drink more. CBT for six sessions. Kudzu capsules from Holland and Barrett that I took religiously for a month and felt absolutely nothing from. Then a school-gate friend told me something that shifted everything for me. She said: your liver has been a bouncer at the door for the last four years. Every supplement you've ever swallowed to help with the drinking — the milk thistle, the kudzu, the magnesium — has been broken down by your liver before it ever reached the receptors that needed it. That's not your fault. That's anatomy. She said the same plant — kudzu, used by doctors in China since around 600 AD to settle heavy drinking — works completely differently when it goes in through the skin instead of through the gut. A research team at a university in [country] found that transdermal delivery sidesteps up to 80% of first-pass metabolism loss. A 2005 trial at a research institute in [country] showed kudzu cut consumption nearly in half in adults who drink most nights — in a single session, without willpower. She'd been wearing a patch for four months. Her sister had given it to her. The patch is called Frimod and you wear it on your shoulder for 24 hours. She didn't tell me what was going to happen on Day 7. She said you have to find that out for yourself. If your GP gave you the talk and moved on. If you've spent a small fortune on capsules that did nothing. If you're awake at 3am every night. Sarah Mitchell wrote about this in an article. Her own story, in her own words, twenty-five years of it. The moment on Day 7 when her daughter looked up at her at breakfast — and what her daughter said — is the part that catches you in the kitchen and makes you cry. Reading her story was the first time I felt understood. Read it. It's the first thing I've read that explained why nothing else worked for me. https://www.zynvista.com/UK/gray-area-drinking

If your lashes have gone from full and dark in your thirties to barely visible in your late forties or fifties, it's not because you need a better mascara, more sleep, or to drink more water. My older sister Helen is 53. She'd had stunning lashes our entire lives. Family joke was that she got them all and there was nothing left for the rest of us. By the time she hit 49, they were basically gone. She'd be on FaceTime with me and I'd genuinely struggle to see her eyes properly. She started wearing two coats of mascara. Then three. Then false lashes for any work event. Then extensions. The extensions were the worst part. Eight months of £85 every fortnight. When she finally took them off because her eyes kept getting irritated, the lashes underneath were ruined. She said it looked like she'd singed them off. She went to her GP, who told her it was just menopause and that was that. She tried a serum from Boots, did nothing. Castor oil, did nothing. She was about to spend £180 on a Latisse consultation when our cousin, who works in a dermatology clinic in Manchester, stopped her. Our cousin sat us both down at Christmas and explained what was actually happening. It's a hormone. DHT. After 45, hormonal shifts mean DHT starts binding to your lash follicles and physically shrinking them. The follicle gets smaller every growth cycle until it produces nothing visible. It's the same mechanism behind male pattern hair thinning, only operating on your lash line. She drew it on a napkin. Drew the follicle. Drew DHT wrapping around it. Said, "Every product Helen's tried is working on the lash. None of them are working on the follicle. That's why nothing's worked." And then she said the bit that made me sit up. Prostaglandin serums, the Latisse type, force growth through a synthetic hormone. Side effects include orbital fat loss requiring surgery, permanent eye colour change, and vision changes. She'd seen patients in clinic who'd needed £6,000 of fat grafting to partially repair the damage. She recommended a Swiss peptide serum called LashVanna. Two peptides, oligopeptide-3 and myristoylpentapeptide-4, that block DHT at the follicle without any hormone. Prostaglandin-free. 90-day guarantee. Helen ordered it that evening. Three weeks later she sent me a photo of her face. Bare. No mascara. And I could see her eyes properly for the first time in two years. Six weeks later, my husband, who notices nothing, said, "Has your sister had something done? Her eyes look completely different." She hasn't worn mascara to work in months. She doesn't book extensions anymore. She told me last week she'd saved enough on extensions and mascara replacements to pay for a long weekend in Lisbon. The article below explains the DHT mechanism properly. If you're over 45 and you've watched your lashes go, read it. It's the first thing that actually explained why everything else hasn't worked. 👉 https://www.zifanna.com/UK/lashes