Carly Hataway has spent the better part of a decade trying to understand her hormones.

The 28-year-old content creator has experimented with diets and supplements to try to regulate her periods. She’s scoured social media, podcasts and medical journals for answers. Doctors told her she should just get back on the birth-control pill.

“I knew that that wasn’t going to fix my problem,” said Hataway, who splits her time between Los Angeles and Scottsdale, Ariz. “That’s just not the root.”

Eventually, she consulted a functional-medicine doctor, an alternative medical practitioner focused on holistic health, who had her take various blood and urine-based tests.

“I finally figured out that my cortisol was really high and that my progesterone and my estrogen were low,” Hataway said. There were also some gut issues, which her doctor said can affect hormonal health. She’s been posting about her experiences on TikTok, where she has more than 70,000 followers.

Women in their 20s and 30s are inundated with information about how to “balance” their hormones with diet, supplements, exercise, “clean” skin care and household products free of “endocrine disrupters.” Some of the guidance comes from doctors and scientists and is backed by rigorous research. But in many cases, influencers and brands are driving the conversation. All of this has led to a hormone craze, where consumers are following their intuition and taking a D.I.Y. approach to their health. Often, their first step is getting off the birth-control pill.

Dr. Erica Johnstone, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist, said that hormonal birth control has many potential benefits beyond contraception, but that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.

“What’s hard is we don’t yet always have a solution to the things women are experiencing,” she said. “That creates this space for approaches, tests, products, that are not evidence-based, that have not been rigorously studied.”

Masha Maltsava, a Los Angeles-based photographer, says she spent much of her young adulthood stressed-out and sleep-deprived. After she stopped taking the pill, she started dealing with acne and inflammation despite working out frequently and eating healthy foods. She was once so desperate for a stress remedy that she got an anesthetic injection in her neck that is meant to block sympathetic nerves and provide a temporary sense of calm. It worked, she said, but she wanted a long-term solution.

“Something was clearly off,” she said. Through lab work, Maltsava said she learned her cortisol was “extremely high” and “all my sex hormones were extremely low.”

As a result, the 38-year-old made some adjustments to her lifestyle. At the top of her list: giving priority to sleep and minimizing stress, factors she tracks with her Oura ring. She cleared her home of so-called forever chemicals, which studies have found can interfere with hormones.

“I started off with just changing out all my cookware to cast iron, changing out my workout clothes, because all of the polyester stuff has PFAS,” she said. She is gentler on her body during her luteal phase (which used to be more simply described as the second half of her menstrual cycle), skipping activities like cold-plunging and opting for less strenuous workouts. She gets lab work done twice a year through the direct-to-consumer testing company Function Health. Maltsava said that when test results come back, customers like her are left to make sense of them; Function said that in certain instances, customers receive a call from a clinician to review results. Maltsava said she has compared recent lab results with previous ones using both Perplexity AI and ChatGPT. “Almost every single marker was a lot better,” she said. She also sees a functional medicine doctor.

Hataway, the content creator, started her own regimen after consulting her functional-medicine doctor. She began taking supplements including an adaptogen blend and a herbal tonic to aid with stress management. She started fueling before workouts, increasing her protein intake and staying hydrated. She also switched to household products that contain fewer hormone-disrupting chemicals.

The birth-control pill, once widely viewed as a symbol of free choice, has become a cultural flashpoint. Some have called it an outdated approach to women’s health—in part because it can have real side effects. At the same time, influencers are amplifying misinformation about the pill. Though oral contraception is widely considered a safe and effective way to prevent pregnancy, there’s been a steady drumbeat of women speaking out about negative experiences with the pill and their decision to stop taking it.

“I hadn’t ovulated in 10 years,” singer Lorde told Rolling Stone in an interview this summer where she disclosed she’d stopped using birth control. “And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.” Brazilian pop star Anitta has said it took her more than a year to “clean” her body post-birth control. “Twilight” actress Ashley Greene Khoury has said the side effects she experienced after quitting the pill led her to co-found Hummingway, which sells patches for menstrual cramping relief.

Dr. Suzanne Gilberg, a board-certified OB-GYN who runs a concierge medical practice in Los Angeles, said this conversation has been driven in part by a generation of women who were put on the pill at a young age for a variety of reasons. Later on, when some of them struggled to get pregnant, they took to social media to share their stories.

Dr. Gilberg said the issue is complicated. The pill has helped countless women go about their lives “without the burden of unplanned pregnancies,” she said, but it may have also masked or helped to manage the symptoms of underlying hormonal issues, such as polycystic ovary syndrome, that women have to navigate when they stop taking it.

When Katherine Beard, 28, stopped taking hormonal birth control, acne, bloating and bad moods followed. Doctors suggested she take the prescription medication Accutane to clear her skin and restart birth control.

Instead, Beard, an entrepreneur and influencer in Austin, Texas, spent months cutting out sugar and processed food (“honestly, I was already eating pretty healthy but I wasn’t as strict with it”), and finding cleaner alternatives to her skin care, makeup and clothing. “Once I swapped all of that out, my acne was gone,” she said.

On TikTok, Beard has built a following of more than a half a million sharing content about hormone health, including product alternatives.

“As I started getting into that lifestyle, it didn’t really feel right to continue with my clothing brand, which just didn’t align with me anymore,” said Beard.

Her new brand Layere uses organic cotton in all of its clothes. Loungewear is 100% cotton, while activewear contains the minimum amount of spandex (5%) required to achieve stretch.

“I feel like it’s so important to avoid polyester, nylon, any sort of plastic. And also the very harsh chemical dyes that are being used in clothing,” she said. “The more I learned, the more I felt I needed to apply to my own brand so I can help other women, too.”

The ecosystem of businesses and influencers appealing to the hormone health-conscious has swelled in recent years, from longevity clinics offering complicated hormone-related lab tests to startups selling supplements to fitness trainers offering workouts tailored to menstrual cycles . But doctors are wary of anything that promises hormonal balance.

“There is no such thing as balancing your hormones,” Dr. Johnstone said. “When we look at natural and normal hormone fluctuations, there’s no balance. They are not balanced by definition.”

Write to Sara Ashley O’Brien at sara.obrien@wsj.com