How to Get Your Pink Back

Here's a fact about flamingos that stopped us the first time we heard it: when a flamingo becomes a parent, it begins to lose its color.

Feeding, protecting, and keeping a chick alive takes almost everything a flamingo has — so much that its feathers start to fade from vivid pink toward gray and white. The color literally goes into the baby. For years, a parent flamingo can look washed out, dull, tired.

And then, when the chick no longer needs them, something remarkable happens. The pink comes back.

If you feel a little gray right now, you are not broken

If you've spent the last decade pouring yourself into other people — raising kids, showing up at work, caring for aging parents, holding everyone's calendar together — you might look in the mirror and feel a little gray yourself.

Not sick, exactly. Not sad, exactly. Just... a bit faded. Less vivid than the woman you remember being.

There's a reason this feeling tends to peak in your late 30s and 40s. It's exactly when perimenopause arrives, layering hormonal shifts on top of years of giving everything away. Lower estrogen and progesterone drain your energy, your sleep, your mood, your sense of self — right when the world expects you to keep giving.

You are not failing at coping. You are a flamingo in the middle of the raising years. The color went somewhere beautiful. It went into everyone you love.

The pink does not come back by accident

Here's the other thing about flamingos: their color returns because they return to what feeds them. The pigment in their feathers comes from the food they eat — the brine shrimp and algae they've always needed. When the demands ease and they feed themselves again, the pink rebuilds from the inside out.

For women, getting your pink back works the same way. It isn't a just a one off spa day. It's a re-feeding of the self:

Name it. What you're feeling has a name — hormonal transition layered on years of depletion. Naming it takes you out of the "what's wrong with me?" spiral.
Feed what faded. Sleep, movement you enjoy, food that supports your changing body, medical care that takes you seriously. Not as rewards for finishing everything else first — as the actual source of your color.
Stand in your flock. Color is contagious. Time with women who are in it too — who laugh, ask real questions, and refuse to whisper about it — restores something nothing else can.
Take up your vividness. The music, the clothes, the hobbies, the ambitions you set down to be practical. They're not frivolous. They're pigment.

You do not have to wait for the demands to end

The hard part is that midlife rarely gives you a clean stretch of "me time" to wait for. The kids still need you, the parents still need you, the job still needs you.

So the answer can't be "wait until everyone's grown." It has to start now, in the midst of it all, of your real life — with real information about what's happening in your body, and with women around you who get it.

That's exactly why we're building Second Summer.

Come get your pink back with us

On November 8, 2026, from 2:30 to 7:00 PM HST, we're gathering at SAVON in Hawai'i Kai for an afternoon built around this exact idea: women in their prime, getting into their groove together, better than ever.

Experts who actually answer your questions — hormones, pelvic health, sleep, skin, and style in midlife
Matcha on arrival, live music, journaling, small bites, and a dessert bar at sunset
A room full of women who stopped whispering about this years ago — or are ready to start talking

No lectures. No selling. Just the flock, and the beginning of your second summer.

The pink comes back. It always does — especially when you're standing next to women who have been there, or are there right now, with you.

We can't wait to see you in the room.

By Gliss Wellness