Get in the mood: meet the woman on a mission to bring balance to millennials

Now you can be hormonal and happy, says Phoebe Luckhurst

At a wedding this summer, a guest christened Amy Thomson with a nickname. Briefly, she became “MenstruAmy”.

“Everyone is bored of my period chat,” she laughs. “My dinner-party chat is so intense: hormone girl in the corner.”

There’s method to her repartee — 30-year-old Thomson is the founder of Moody, a new digital platform intended to help women better understand their hormones, cycles and moods.

The online magazine launched last week — the first stage in the Moody movement — with pieces including an interview with Melissa Hemsley, one half of the winsome Hemsley sisters, an article about toxic additives in beauty products and a guide to practising yoga during your period.

Moody founder Amy Thomson
Matt Writtle

The tone is sassy, not like the breathy voiceover of a tampon advert, or the clinical tone of a sex-ed video, and the brand is irreverent and approachable — consistent with millennial, marketable feminism.

The site’s origin story is personal. Thomson was running a marketing, communications and events agency, with clients including Microsoft and Nike. It was “very exciting but very stressful”, and about two years ago her periods stopped for almost a year.

After spending “all the money on pregnancy tests”, she ended up at an endocrinologist (a hormone specialist) and learned that she had problems with her adrenal glands and cortisol levels. “Which is all to do with stress,” she says. “I had no idea that stress could physically impact your body in that way. It blew my mind.” It also gave her the idea for Moody. There’s more to Moody than articles.

Complete a questionnaire about your moods, diet and cravings, and it will assign you one of five tribes that might give a clue to your hormonal flashpoints. I got “Hive”, the chief characteristic being issues with blood-sugar balance (which I do have). With your type identified, you can then buy suitable vitamins and supplements catered to your type straight from the site.

Practical action is an important element of what Moody will do. “We wanted to produce a space where girls can go to understand more about hormones, about why the understanding is relevant, and offer them things you can proactively do to balance your mood,” says Thomson. She has worked with dietitians, endocrinologists, gynaecologists and nutritionists to create content for the site and recommend vitamins and supplements.

Indeed, she wants Moody to be an authoritative, trusted voice as, at times, the health and wellness industry can feel like a cynical way of capitalising on women’s neuroses. The advisory service, Talk to Moody, is one way that Thomson wants to show she’s on our side — a dietitian, endocrinologist and gynaecologist will be on hand during working hours to answer questions (confidentially) and quell anxieties.

“There’s this disconnect between this sense of what is normal and what is not,” she says. “It’s important to go to your doctor but it’s also important to know what’s normal.”

The site is designed to cater to women of all ages, from puberty to menopause. “Every woman has hormone cycles. Your period is one data spot, it’s one entry within a month but the rest of the month you’re still hormonal. You’re continually going through these cycles.”

Saying that, Moody has a millennial, zeitgeist feel to it: from the interviews with the Hemsley sisters to the stash, including nightshirts reading, “I woke up like this”.

Girl talk: vitamin and supplement plans are matched to your mood

The packaging of Moody’s chosen vitamins and supplements, by Lisbon-based brand Biocol, resemble the clean, chic packaging of a beauty brand such as Malin + Goetz. Gym bags bear the brand’s strapline, “We are Moody, we are human”: a call to arms that seems designed for Instagram (though Thomson says on the way to our meeting that an older woman had spotted her carrying it and used it as an opener to discuss the menopause).

Speaking of Instagram, @moodymonth (1,500 followers but growing) is a mixture of provocative images (semi-nudity, pictures of fruits that look like nipples) and girl-power mantras. There’s a weekly newsletter: topics include periods, sleep and sex.

Normalising emotions and openness about mental and physical health also feels very millennial, though Thomson thinks it’s important to arm every woman with the language and a space to discuss. “This stuff, it’s not complex,” she points out. “It’s just about conversation and normalising things that have been stigmatised.”

She brings up the viral Bodyform advert from this month, the first to use red liquid on a sanitary product, a verisimilitude that scandalised some viewers. “Oh, God forbid, red liquids,” she says, rolling her eyes. “It’s funny — one of the images people didn’t like on Moody was the red feather on the sanitary towel. I like it — provocative is good. We’re not trying to say, ‘oh, let’s just talk about our periods all the time’, but a taboo around something that happens to 50 per cent of the population is weird.”

An app, Moody You, is planned for next September. Thomson describes it as “mood forecasting”: it will sync up with your iCal and pull in details such as the weather, as well as your hormonal cycle, in order to present a visual report that could offer clues to why you’re feeling down — knowledge which can, in itself, make you feel better. “We’re just giving information that’s already in your head and putting it into a central place.”

She’s also determined to smooth out the “Them vs Us” conflict that seems to exist between technology and our mental health. “We want to build technologies that allow people to understand their bodies better.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in