Our Experts

Our contributors bring a wealth of professional experience and individual perspectives to Essence & Style. Their backgrounds span beauty, food, and wellness, with each offering insight informed by their own work and expertise.

Alena Sarri

Alena Sarri is the co-founder and Managing Director of Aquatots Swim School, a family-owned swim school operating across four locations in Canberra since 2002. She has been teaching swimming since 1998, previously taught at the Australian Institute of Sport, and specialises in babies and toddlers. Alena developed Aqua Bubbas, an aquatic development program for infants from six weeks of age. Under her leadership, Aquatots won Gold ACT Employer of Choice at the 2025 ASSA awards.

Alyssa Ostroff

Alyssa Ostroff is the founder and designer of Self-Care Shirts, a hand-drawn mental health brand she launched in 2025, one month after being laid off from her role as a Senior Graphic Designer at the CDC. Each design began as a therapy or healing saying she needed to hear and wear but couldn't find anywhere, so she drew it herself. As a trauma survivor who is autistic and ADHD and lives with narcolepsy and Tourette's, she creates from lived experience and leans on humor as one of her core coping tools. Every order from Self-Care Shirts supports the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and The Trevor Project. She lives in South Florida with her husband and her beagle, Bailey.

Amit Gupta, MD

Amit Gupta, MD is the author of Amitaeus’ Holistic Healing Manual: Ancient Blueprint for Natural Healing from Within, an exploration of individualized health across the physical body, energy, mind, wisdom, and harmony.

A physician and Ayurvedic practitioner, he brings together modern medicine, classical healing traditions, research, and systems thinking.

He is also a healthcare innovator and entrepreneur whose work helped advance consumer-directed healthcare and the concepts that led to the creation of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) in the United States.

His career has spanned digital health, healthcare technology, clinical decision support, artificial intelligence, research, and the development of healthcare companies and patented systems.

Through Amitaeus authorship, he now focuses on translating enduring principles of personalized healing into an accessible framework for modern life.

Christal Love

Christal Love, LMT, MMP, is the founder of Massage Therapeutix, a Georgia-based massage and wellness company serving individuals, veterans, and organizations. Her work focuses on therapeutic recovery, workplace wellness, and helping people better understand the role recovery plays in healthy aging and everyday well-being. She also supports practitioner development and education within the massage and wellness profession. Christal is a published Essence & Style contributor and enjoys bringing a practical, real-life perspective to conversations about recovery, self-care, and wellness.

Guery Cordovadisla

Guery Cordovadisla is the Co-Founder of Domepeace, a scalp care brand created specifically for bald men. He leads the company’s finance, SEO, and paid acquisition efforts, with a focus on building sustainable ecommerce growth. A U.S. military veteran, Guery brings an operator’s mindset to product development, customer acquisition, and brand strategy. Through Domepeace, he is helping make bald head care a more defined and better-served category within men’s grooming.

Jason Decker

Jason Decker is the owner of This Silly Girl's Kitchen, a food blog with more than 1,500 tested comfort food recipes. He is not a classically trained chef. He worked the line at a restaurant through college, and that is where he fell in love with cooking. Today he develops and tests recipes at home in Phoenix with his daughters, Maddie and Lizzie. He also built BlogPrep, the audit system that keeps the blog running.

Jing Castro

Jing Castro is a board-certified aesthetic nurse practitioner and founder of Blue Sky Laser & Tox in Arlington, Virginia. Her approach to aesthetic medicine takes a long-term view of aging, considering changes in skin quality, facial structure, and tissue over time rather than focusing on any single treatment or trend. She draws on advanced technology, regenerative treatments, and detailed facial assessment to develop individualized care grounded in evidence and realistic expectations. Through both her clinical work and writing, Jing is interested in helping patients better understand their options while preserving natural features and individuality.

Joanna Bacchus

Joanna Bacchus is the Founder and CEO of BIOSTRIPS®, a nutraceutical innovation company redefining supplement delivery through sugar-free, vegan oral dissolving strips. As a Certified Nutritional Advisor, author, and wellness entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience across business, nutrition, and consumer health, she combines science-backed formulation, consumer insight, and innovation to create simpler wellness routines. Joanna is a recognized voice in metabolic health, women’s wellness, GLP-1 companion nutrition space, and the future of personalized supplementation. Joanna speaks and writes on supplement innovation, oral dissolving technology, microencapsulation, and building health brands designed around real human behavior.

Mark Dixon

Mark Dixon is the CEO and co-owner of Fly Oz, a flight training school in Cowra, New South Wales, that he co-founded and where he still teaches. He came to aviation from a background in adult education and training, and has spent more than a decade as a pilot and flight instructor. Mark is a CASA Flight Examiner for licences and ratings, including Private and Instrument, and trains pilots on complex aircraft and gas turbine engine endorsements. Under his leadership, Fly Oz has trained hundreds of pilots now working across the aviation industry, including with airlines.

Olivia Parks

Olivia Parks is a professional organizer in New Orleans, LA, and the owner of Nola Organizers, Professional Organizer New Orleans, and Professional Organizers Baton Rouge. She and her team have helped more than 1,000 clients declutter, organize, pack, and unpack their homes. Through her home organizing services, Olivia helps homeowners save time, energy, and effort while getting their homes organized and easier to manage.

Samantha Stupak

Samantha Stupak is the Founder and CEO of CBH Energetics and PetMedella, specializing in bioenergetic testing and functional wellness since 2012. A Certified Natural Health Professional, Dr. Amen Licensed Brain Health Trainer, and engineer by degree, Samantha brings an analytical, whole-body approach to understanding the patterns and underlying stressors that can influence health. Her companies have analyzed more than 50,000 hair and saliva bioenergetic scans and built a global network of more than 1,000 affiliated practitioners. Her work is deeply influenced by her own journey with chronic illness and her passion for helping people connect the dots between their symptoms, environment, nutrition, and overall well-being.