Sat on the coach, I couldn't help but look across the aisle at the woman reading Cosmopolitan. More precisely, at the magazine itself.
The 100 Beauty Products That Will Change Your Life article featured a sublist of 35 Products Beauty Editors Swear By. This was followed by a piece on Natural Radiant Beauty.
How natural is radiant beauty when it's made from a hundred tricks performed with a heap of several dozen different products?
A few pages further in we came to an article entitled How Normal Are Your Breasts?.
Is there a meter you rig them up to so you can find out? "Hey, I'm a 7.5 but you're only a 4.6!" What might the unit of measurement be called?
Beyond there, a full page ad for some Nivea skin product headlined Catch Everybody's Eye. What's that about? 'Want attention but been convinced by this mag you're ugly? Buy our product to get attention and be worthy of it'.
What would a skin cream have to do to make the wearer catch everybody's eye? All the options I can think of certainly wouldn't look good, that's for sure. Most of them are really gruesome. And that's before we consider a literal interpretation that involves fish hooks or somesuch.
How could you compete with Cosmo? I'm thinking of starting You're Ugly And Wrong Monthly, featuring articles like 58 Expensive Things To Buy For No Real Reason, or 100 Things Repulsive Inadequates Like You Bought To Make Themselves Physically Acceptable.
As Mary Schmich's classic Chicago Tribune column said, do not read beauty magazines; they will only make you feel ugly.
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8 years ago
3 comments:
But if I didn't read Cosmo, how would I ever learn the 12 secrets to satisfying my lover?
OK, OK, so I haven't had one of them in a while... but you got to keep up with the latest tricks. Otherwise one day I'll have a lover and won't know all the new shit.
Just imagine it... there we are in bed and I'm still doing all the stuff from months ago! "It's June you idiot! Anti-clockwise clitoral stimulation is sooo last November!"
How embarrassing.
If you shop at Morrison's then you are confronted by their checkout racks of celeb gossip mags and a thing called Men's Health Magazine.
Every month this title has 'Get A 6 Pack For Summer!' or 'Fight The Flab: Get That 6 Pack Back!' or somesuch.
Aside of the peculiarity of desiring an abdomen that looks like you're gestating sextuplets of the monster from Alien, the point is that if any of the plans really worked then they'd only sell one issue of the mag.
Their repeated promises of the same thing are all the evidence we need that they're lying.
Just this week I found myself wondering why the fuck I buy this mag every month. Twice, actually - US and UK editions. I don't even read them anymore - they repeat the same crap over and over again.
I've got 3 years worth at the moment. Had 12 years worth before I left the states. Surely there's a self-help group for this?
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