The ‘Luteal Uglies’ and Everything Else Happening in Women’s Health

The trends, headlines and conversations shaping women’s health right now, plus what we think is actually worth taking from them.

There is a lot happening to the female body right now. Or, more accurately, there are a lot of people talking about what is happening to the female body.

TikTok has diagnosed us with the “luteal uglies”. Sydney Sweeney got naked for a sports ad and female athletes were not impressed. Researchers can now map changes in our vital signs across the menstrual cycle using more than a million days of wearable data. And, away from our feeds, more than one million Australian women have accessed cheaper contraception, endometriosis or menopause treatments.

Some of it feels like enormous progress. Some of it feels suspiciously like women have been handed a shiny new list of things to worry about.

Welcome to October’s In Bloom, our monthly edit of what’s happening in women’s health, bodies and culture right now, and what any of it actually means for you.

THE ‘LUTEAL UGLIES’ ARE ALL OVER YOUR FYP

If you've recently looked in the mirror before your period and thought God, what happened?, TikTok has a name for that now.

The “luteal uglies” describes the supposedly less attractive version of ourselves that appears between ovulation and menstruation. Think bloating, acne, fatigue, cravings, mood changes and, according to social media, an inexplicable disappearance of your cheekbones.

It has become big enough that on September 22, Daisy Henry investigated the trend for Fashion Journal, speaking to obstetrician and gynaecologist Dr Chelsea Watt about whether our new fascination with the luteal phase is actually helping women. Henry describes TikToks comparing women's ovulatory and luteal faces, sometimes using distorted filters, alongside lists of products and habits promising to help women “beat” the luteal uglies.

And here is where things get complicated.

There is something genuinely brilliant about thousands of women knowing what the luteal phase is.

Women's health has spent a very long time being something we whispered about. Period pain was something to tolerate. Premenstrual symptoms were something to joke about. Changes in appetite, energy or mood were often treated as personal failings rather than experiences worth understanding.

Now women are comparing notes.

But we seem to have travelled remarkably quickly from “understand your luteal phase” to “here's how to look better during it.”

Dr Watt makes an important distinction in Henry's article. Curiosity about your body is valuable, but problems arise when that curiosity becomes another list of things women are supposedly required to do. Her advice ultimately comes back to knowing your own body and your own pattern. If you feel fine, you don't need to manufacture a problem simply because TikTok says women in their luteal phase should feel terrible. If symptoms consistently affect your life, that's different, and they're worth taking seriously.

That feels like a pretty good philosophy for Phase & Flow too.

We're not here to tell you to love your luteal phase. We're not going to tell you to hate it either.

We'd rather you know what's happening in your body, recognise what is normal for you, have the information to notice when something isn't right and then decide how you feel about the rest.

Because perhaps cycle awareness was never supposed to make us perfect at every phase.

It was supposed to make us understand ourselves a little better.

P&F HOT TIP: Your cycle app can tell you what phase you're in. It cannot tell you whether you look good today. That's still your department.

SYDNEY SWEENEY GOT NAKED (AGAIN) AND EVERYONE HAS AN OPINION

If there's one thing the internet loves more than a woman's body, it's deciding what that woman should be allowed to do with it.

This month's case study: Sydney Sweeney.

In September, Sweeney appeared in a campaign for sports prediction platform Novig, mock-playing different sports while wearing very little, and sometimes apparently nothing at all. At one point she's topless on a basketball hoop. At another, footballs cover her chest.

It was provocative on purpose and, unsurprisingly, people had thoughts.

Female athletes were among the loudest critics.

American gymnast Gracie Kramer responded with a video declaring, “this is what a woman in sport looks like,” prompting other athletes to show what female bodies actually do in sport. Australian Olympic swimmer Ariarne Titmus called the campaign “an absolute joke” and questioned why women's bodies were once again being sexualised in the context of sport.

Their frustration makes sense.

Women in sport have spent decades fighting to have their bodies valued for speed, strength, skill and performance, rather than their appeal to men. There is a very real conversation to be had about what happens when sexual imagery is dropped straight back into that environment.

But there is another woman in this conversation too.

Sydney Sweeney.

And she appears to have chosen this.

Sweeney wasn't photographed without her knowledge or reluctantly placed into somebody else's campaign. ABC reported that she has an equity stake in Novig, and following the backlash she publicly shared imagery from ESPN's famous Body Issue, which featured nude athletes. Whatever you think of the campaign itself, her participation complicates the idea that this is simply a story about a woman being sexualised against her will.

Which brings us to a much messier question.

Can we fight the unwanted sexualisation of women while still leaving women completely free to enjoy being sexual?

At Phase & Flow, we spend a lot of time talking about what it means to live with a female body rather than constantly trying to correct it.

And that body doesn't feel exactly the same every day.

Some women notice changes in libido, confidence or desire across their menstrual cycle. You might have days where the thought of anyone looking at you makes you want to disappear into an enormous T-shirt.

You might also have days where you feel incredible, want to put on the tiny dress, flirt with your partner and thoroughly enjoy being looked at.

Maybe that happens around ovulation for you. Maybe it happens at another point in your cycle. Maybe your cycle has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The important bit is that you're allowed to decide.

Because if our version of female empowerment leaves room for the woman who doesn't want to be sexualised, surely it also has to leave room for the woman who willingly says, actually, I feel hot and I'd quite like to enjoy it.

That doesn't erase the criticism from female athletes. And Sydney Sweeney choosing to participate doesn't mean every use of a sexualised female body suddenly becomes empowering.

It just means two things can be true at once.

Women should not have sexuality imposed on them. Women also shouldn't have sexuality taken away from them in the name of empowerment.

Maybe the line isn't simply sexual versus not sexual.

Maybe it's choice.

P&F HOT TIP: Feeling yourself around ovulation? Buy the lingerie. Send the text. Plan the steamy weekend. Equally, if some creepy guy wolf-whistles you on the street, feel completely free to tell him where to go. Wanting to be desired on your terms does not give everybody else permission to participate.

YOUR WATCH KNOWS YOU'RE LUTEAL. SHOULD YOU?

Here's a peculiar modern experience.

You wake up.

You feel... pretty good.

You check your sleep tracker.

Apparently you slept terribly.

Interesting. Because now that you mention it, you are actually quite tired.

Sound familiar?

On September 8, researchers at Stanford University and WHOOP published research using 1.2 million days of wearable data across more than 42,000 menstrual cycles to map how biometric signals change across the menstrual cycle.

Resting heart rate. Heart-rate variability. Respiratory rate. Skin temperature. Blood oxygen.

For women's health research, this is huge. As Stanford's Jennifer Hicks pointed out, these are basic vital signs used by doctors, athletes and researchers, yet we have historically known remarkably little about how they change across menstrual cycles of different lengths and across women of different ages.

Better baselines could help us understand women's bodies more accurately.

But it also got us thinking.

What happens when knowing our bodies and measuring our bodies start becoming the same thing?

Stanford gives a great example. Your smartwatch tells you your resting heart rate has increased and your heart-rate variability has fallen, so you assume you're poorly recovered and change your workout.

Except several things can influence those numbers, including your sleep and where you are in your menstrual cycle. A single score doesn't necessarily tell you why it changed.

And we're already familiar with this phenomenon through sleep tracking.

You thought you slept well until your Oura Ring told you otherwise.

So will cycle tracking eventually do the same?

Could you wake up feeling great, open your app, see LUTEAL PHASE, and suddenly start searching for evidence?

Am I a little bloated?

Actually, I am kind of irritable.

Wait. Do I have the luteal uglies?

I've caught myself doing exactly this. Feeling completely fine, checking where I am in my cycle and suddenly wondering whether I should be feeling worse.

That doesn't mean cycle tracking is making us miserable. And it certainly doesn't mean we should throw away our wearables.

It just means that more data isn't automatically the same thing as more self-awareness.

Maybe part of knowing your body is also knowing when to listen to it before you listen to the app.

P&F HOT TIP: Tomorrow morning, before you check your Oura, WHOOP, sleep score or cycle app, ask yourself one thing first: How do I actually feel? Give your body first dibs on the answer. Then look at the data.

WOMEN'S HEALTH FINALLY GOT SOME GOOD NEWS

Okay, enough discourse.

Something actually happened this month that could materially make women's healthcare better.

During Women's Health Week, the Australian Government announced that more than one million Australian women had accessed cheaper medicines for contraception, endometriosis and menopause through its Women's Health Package.

Since March 2025, women had filled more than four million cheaper prescriptions, resulting in reported savings of more than $150 million.

More than 400,000 women had accessed cheaper contraception. Around 520,000 had accessed cheaper menopausal hormone therapies. More than 11,000 women with endometriosis had accessed treatments at PBS prices.

And those numbers matter because women's health progress cannot exist entirely in awareness campaigns.

Yes, we need to talk about endometriosis.

Yes, we need women to understand menopause.

Yes, breaking taboos around contraception and reproductive health matters.

But eventually, someone has to be able to walk into a pharmacy or doctor's office and afford the healthcare they need.

The same government update reports that all 33 Endometriosis and Pelvic Pain Clinics are now open, more than 137,000 women have undergone a Medicare-covered menopause health assessment, and changes to Medicare are reducing some out-of-pocket costs associated with IUDs and contraceptive implants.

It isn't as likely to appear between two GRWM videos on your feed.

But this is the women's-health boom we'd quite like to see more of.

Less telling women that they should care about their health.

More making it possible for them to actually do something about it.

P&F HOT TIP: Been putting off the GP appointment, asking about contraception, investigating painful periods or raising a symptom because it feels “not bad enough”? Consider this your reminder to book it. Women's health becoming more visible only matters if we actually use the care available to us.

SO, WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED lAST MONTH?

Quite a lot, apparently.

Women learnt another new way to describe how they look before their periods.

Female athletes reminded the internet that women's bodies can be powerful without needing to be sexy, while Sydney Sweeney reminded us that some women might still quite enjoy being sexy.

Researchers gave us one of the most detailed pictures yet of how our vital signs change across the menstrual cycle.

And more than a million Australian women accessed cheaper women's healthcare.

They're wildly different stories.

But they all circle the same question:

Who gets to tell a woman what is happening in her own body?

For a long time, women simply weren't given enough information.

Now we're swimming in it.

Doctors. TikTok. Journalists. Apps. Wearables. Influencers. Governments. Brands.

And, yes, Phase & Flow.

The answer isn't to know less.

It's to get better at knowing what deserves our attention.

That's what we want In Bloom to become.

Phase & Flow isn't here to hand you another rulebook for being a woman. Quite frankly, there are enough of those already.

We want to tell you what's happening. Introduce you to the people worth listening to. Pull apart the trends appearing on your feed. Give you the health context underneath the headline. Occasionally ask whether we've all lost the plot.

And then let you decide what any of it means for your body.

Because knowing your body should make it feel more like yours.

Not like another full-time job.