Erin Docherty
Erin Docherty covers beauty and women’s health for Mamamia with a focus on how appearance, wellbeing and social pressure intersect in everyday life. She mixes product-led beauty coverage with reported health stories that look closely at how trends, medications and industry norms shape women’s bodies and choices.
Beauty, products and routines with a service lens
Docherty writes frequently about beauty products, routines and trends, with detailed, highly practical round‑ups of what works and why. In a recent piece on The Body Shop, she selected “the best 10 The Body Shop products of all time”, drawing on her experience testing viral products and distilling them into clear recommendations. She also breaks down high‑profile beauty moments, such as her analysis of Kim Kardashian’s Allure interview, where she unpacked the reality of a celebrity routine for a mainstream audience. Across these stories she writes in a direct, explanatory tone, foregrounding texture, performance and value rather than hype.
Her beauty coverage extends into specialist advice formats. In one episode of Mamamia’s You Beauty podcast, Docherty spoke with a leading manicurist “to find out their pet peeves” and what your nail technician really thinks, translating insider expertise into practical takeaways for listeners. She appears as a rotating co‑host on the You Beauty podcast, which is billed as a daily beauty show fronted by Mamamia’s beauty editor and other beauty journalists. Taken together, her beauty work emphasises clear guidance, tested recommendations and accessible routines aimed at helping women navigate a fast‑moving product landscape.
Women’s health, bodies and medicalised beauty
Alongside beauty, Docherty reports on women’s health topics where medicine, body image and culture overlap. In “Something borrowed, something prescribed: The new reality of wedding weight loss”, she examines how medicalised weight loss, including prescribed medications, is becoming embedded in wedding preparation, and interrogates the pressures driving women toward these choices. Her explainer‑style health content includes reproductive health pieces such as “Everything you’ve ever known about your period is probably wrong”, which challenges common myths and reframes menstruation in straightforward language. She also covers dermatology‑adjacent health topics, as seen in “Does beef tallow actually work? A dermatologist answers”, where she uses expert commentary to assess a trending skincare ingredient and its impact on skin.
Her fitness and lifestyle health writing sits in the same pragmatic frame. In a story about quitting the gym and getting into the best shape at home, she outlines simple principles and low‑cost approaches to exercise, focusing on sustainable habits rather than intensive regimes. Across these pieces, Docherty’s health coverage is highly service‑oriented, combining expert voices with an emphasis on demystifying medical or quasi‑medical trends that are influencing how women think about their bodies.
Relationships, mental load and life transitions
Docherty also writes about the emotional and relational dimensions of women’s lives, often linking them back to wellbeing. In coverage of divorce, she explores “the perks of divorce nobody talks about”, highlighting unexpected positives and reframing separation in terms of agency, rest and personal growth. She has written about sleep and rest, including a feature under Mamamia’s Gift of Sleep banner, where she reports on having “more sleep than ever” and the impact of improved sleep on daily functioning. These stories sit alongside pieces and podcast content that touch on grief, self‑acceptance and “learning to live with myself”, pointing to a broader interest in how women navigate difficult periods and internal narratives.
Her treatment of these themes tends to be candid and grounded in lived experience, whether her own or that of interviewees, with an eye on the practical shifts that can ease mental load and improve quality of life. Even when the topic is more emotional than clinical, she maintains a clear, unadorned style that is consistent with her health and beauty reporting.
Crime, trauma and stories of harm
On occasion, Docherty steps outside beauty and health into reported features on crime and abuse that affect women’s bodies and safety. In one investigation, she reports on Dominique Pelicot, a man who raped his wife for years and is now being investigated for murder, including graphic details of sexual assault. In these pieces she adopts a more hard‑news tone, setting out the facts of the case and the long‑term harm experienced by victims.
While these stories are less frequent than her beauty and health coverage, they align with her broader focus on how women’s bodies are controlled, harmed or judged, whether by partners, institutions or cultural expectations. The through‑line across her work is an insistence on naming those pressures clearly, while still offering readers practical information and language to understand their own experiences.
Experience across beauty and health media
Beyond Mamamia, Docherty has written widely on beauty and grooming for other health and lifestyle publications, contributing product reviews and service journalism across women’s and men’s titles. She is regularly identified as a beauty editor in industry and podcast materials. This background underpins her authority when she tests products, interviews experts or decodes viral trends.
For communications teams, the key is that Docherty prioritises stories where beauty, health and real‑world impact meet: products and treatments that materially affect women’s bodies, wellbeing or confidence; medical or dermatological trends entering mainstream culture; and life transitions where appearance, rest and self‑care are central. She responds best to pitches that combine credible expertise or data with a clear, everyday benefit for women navigating those issues.
4 more health journalists.
Abida Tasnim
Abida Tasnim is a health writer for The Daily Star who focuses on clear, practical guidance that helps readers recognise risks early and act before everyday illnesses turn into wider public health problems. She reports on infectious disease prevention, using measles coverage to show how outbreaks start with individual decisions and behaviours, not just hospital statistics. Her work explains what happens during an outbreak and then anchors the story in simple steps people can take, such as avoiding crowded places when symptoms appear, practising good hygiene, and seeking medical advice early. She writes direct, action‑oriented health explainers that turn clinical questions about contagion and disease burden into everyday choices. Across her beat, she stresses early recognition, timely care, and prevention as the foundations of healthier communities.
Adrián Carballo Casla
Adrián Carballo Casla stands out for turning complex cohort data on ageing into clear, food‑level advice on what older adults should eat to protect brain health and slow chronic disease. He is a researcher in nutritional epidemiology focused on ageing and chronic disease prevention and a postdoctoral researcher in geriatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, writing health explainers for The Conversation. He reports on how diet quality, especially Mediterranean and Mind‑style patterns, shapes dementia risk, grey matter loss and neurocognitive ageing, and how healthy versus pro‑inflammatory diets alter multimorbidity trajectories. His articles translate findings on flavonoids, polyphenols, folate, omega‑3 fats and dietary nitrates into specific food choices and small, practical changes. Much of his coverage is anchored in his own studies on multimorbidity, high‑risk older adults and tailored dietary recommendations, often syndicated to other outlets.
Ahmed Elbediwy
Ahmed Elbediwy brings a lab-based understanding of cancer biology and clinical biochemistry to public-facing health reporting, linking drug mechanisms and molecular pathways to everyday choices about medicines and products. He writes for The Conversation on weight-loss injections, cancer overdiagnosis and anti-ageing supplements, focusing on obesity medicine, cancer signalling, screening trade-offs, skincare and supplement science. His pieces on GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro explain why some people do not respond, how gut hormones and appetite signals work, and where psychological support and nutrition fit alongside prescriptions. He co-authors explainers on cancer risk and overdiagnosis and on whether supplements can reverse ageing, separating established knowledge from emerging research. An award-winning senior lecturer at Kingston University, he favours clear, structured explainers, careful definition of key terms and evidence-based appraisal over hype.
Amanda Sheppeard
Amanda Sheppeard is a managing editor and health journalist known for long, detailed explainers that connect complex clinical research, disability policy and political narratives with the daily realities of doctors and patients. She works at The Medical Republic across editorial leadership and commercial content while reporting widely on medicine for its specialist titles. Her real beat spans autism, disability policy, autoimmune disease, infectious threats and system pressures in primary care and hospitals. She covers subjects such as autism diagnosis and the NDIS, rheumatology’s clinical shifts, weight-loss agents in rheumatoid arthritis, infection control, antimicrobial resistance and new modalities like CAR T-cell therapy and microneedles. She reports by doing the synthesis inside the story, linking trial design, molecular targets, funding rules and policy changes to concrete decisions and workflows in clinics and hospitals.