Youth Or Fiction?

A product that promises youthful energy, higher sex drive, and dewy skin for just a dollar a day? Sounds too good to be true, but Kiwi women are already getting their hands on testosterone cream. Is it really the miracle treatment its cracked up to be?

- Amy Nelmes Bissett

From the outside, the three-storey facility on the outskirts of St Albans in Christchurch looks like any other run-of-the-mill medical building. If anything, the greying women’s health centre where Dr Anna Fenton works is actually quite drab.

But within the four walls of Southern Women’s Health, Fenton holds the key to what some are hailing a ‘miracle elixir’. Testosterone treatment may be about to be as big as Botox, with its promise to boost women in their 40s and 50s with youthful energy, glowing skin and a jolt of sexual desire. However, the treatment isn’t yet approved for women in New Zealand, and Fenton is having to use a medical loophole to ship it to our shores from Western Australia. And she’s only one of 10 doctors in the country who can get her hands on it.

“There’s a huge demand there,” Fenton, NZ’s leading gynaecological endocrinologist, tells NEXT. “But [nothing has been] approved for women to use anywhere in the world. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, so we make the best use of the products we can access and make them appropriate dose-wise for women.”

The product in question is AndroFeme. It comes in an unassuming tube that, with its accompanying syringe, is reminiscent of those containing thrush cream. Inside is the 1% of testosterone that can, some doctors say, change a woman’s life. Smoothing the cream onto untanned skin, like the underside of an arm or inside the leg, on a daily basis is said to give women the mid-life boost they’ve been searching for – and it takes just a few days to take effect. Fenton sees the treatment as a lifeline for women as they struggle with the low mood that often clouds over when sexual urge slips away. She dubs it the “marriage saver”.