Hi, designer/cofounder of Elpha here. Thank you for the comment! It is tricky to design a UGC site for women, and we aim for friendliness/neutral than feminine. Glad you like Chiswick!
Yeah I think neutral has gotten a lot easier to pull off in the last five years just because of all the design resources put out by Google, Apple, and MS. Even though I don't like Material as a strict design language, just the fact that it's clearly explained and all the resources behind it are free is a much better starting point than being more limited to reverse engineering existing sites and picking up their biases along the way.
Can't agree more! There are only 3 of us, and we have so much to do, resources like material design really help us speed up the design & dev process.