Glossed Over

A Sticky Situation in Lucky's September Issue

In its patriotic mission to stimulate the economy, Lucky does everything it can to make shopping easier for the few, the proud, the misanthropes who detest malls, and the between-sizes Americans prone to fitting-room meltdowns. With the stickers marked “YES!” and “MAYBE?” in every issue, vicarious shopping has never been easier! 

This month, instead of tearing out the stickers to annotate a publication with actual paragraphs (like, say, a book), I actually affixed them to the magazine's comparatively noteworthy pages. And in my mission to help you avoid “reading” Lucky, here's what I culled from the September issue:

YES! I may need the entirety of Anna Sui’s Gossip Girl-inspired collection for Target, now that I’ve seen the two-page ad near the front of this issue. Unchecked spending on stuff I don’t need makes me a good American, right?

YES! Just as expected, Kim France’s “Editor’s Letter” does acknowledge the crummy financial climate, but adds that “against all odds,” the magazine’s fashion editors found plenty of great stuff for fall. Such sacrifice!

YES! Lucky continues its slaughter of the English language on page 94, trotting out the non-word “splurgier.” Are there fuses in my brain? Because I think one just blew.

MAYBE? It is totally acceptable to shop at outlets. If you’re in Italy and buying stuff at the Prada outlet, that is. (page 108)

YES! There exists an article of clothing called “zoot pants,” and Lucky’s “Style Spy” expects you to wear them for fall.

YES! Lucky’s editors may suffer from long-term memory loss, since they’ve managed to load up “The Smart Shopping Sourcebook” with heaps of accessories and clothes under $100, but can’t seem to remember those stylish bargains long enough to insert many of them in other features.

YES! According to “Accessories Report,” eyeglasses are in for fall. Great! I hate when glasses are out and I have to go around squinting. Suffer for fashion, right? (Or, you know, wear them and look like I don’t care about my appearance at all.)

MAYBE? Ed Hardy’s new perfume, which, according to the ad in this issue, is a “vintage tattoo inspired fragrance,” could be less appealing. But probably not.

YES! Cosmetics are the sure path to happiness and fulfillment! According to “Beauty Spy,” hot pink blush will make you “instantly feel 5,000 times prettier.” The latest anti-wrinkle potions are “kind of miraculous.” A saffron lip stain is “unexpectedly gorgeous”—for $65, it had better be. A new Maybelline lipstick is “perfect,” and a handful of acne products work with “stunning efficiency.” Yay!

MAYBE? Despite the wisdom so altruistically dispensed on page 214, most readers probably don’t need detailed instructions on shampooing.

YES! It is possible to “Love Your Hair,” as page 224 exuberantly instructs. It doesn’t require a shift in perspective—just a heap of drugstore products, a $140 flat iron, and a $34 shampoo. Easy!

MAYBE? We shouldn’t take beauty editors’ advice as gospel, since in “Skin Regimens of Beauty Editors,” one confesses that she hates washing her face at night and another never takes off her eye makeup before bed. As all of us who’ve been indoctrinated by a lifetime of women’s mags know, not washing up before sleeping is a cardinal sin.

MAYBE? I might have actually used the stickers to mark various pages of the “Lucky Fall Shoe Guide.” I’ll never tell.

YES! As noted in “40s Modern,” the right clothes can make me “magpie-cool.” Whatever that means.

YES! A $415 leopard-print blouse can be worn for work, weekend, and evening, according to “Fall’s Most Versatile Pieces.” Good thing, too, because at that price, it’d be the only blouse I own.

MAYBE? An $1195 Emporio Armani jacket and $630 Bruno Frisoni pumps, as seen on pages 280 and 281, aren’t the best exemplars of the “punk rock” or “collegiate” style the spread is supposed to embody. But then, neither is posing those “punk rock” models in front of a nightclub advertising a show presented by Radio Disney. Oops!

YES! Now that I’ve read the entire issue, I do want to purchase a new wardrobe! Lucky, you’ve successfully completed your mission.

InStyle Makeover Needs a Makeover of Its Own

As I discovered this weekend, InStyle Makeover and Taco Bell are remarkably similar. They're both cheap and require a very strong gag reflex. 

What was it about this special issue that was so hard to swallow? Was it the $600 cosmetic case? The fact that some no-doubt-underpaid editorial assistant had to conceptualize the ways in which a purse can camouflage a “flawed” figure? Or that every woman made over in this issue didn’t really need a makeover?

Impossible beauty standards, you win again! And we lose.

Take a look at Vanessa Hudgens, who was given an “undone” makeover. This was the result:

According to InStyle, this is a “polished no-makeup look.” Don’t you roll out of bed sporting fake eyelashes and the exact right shade of nude lipstick? With a professional hairstylist and makeup artist at your disposal, this natural look is so easy to achieve!

A few pages later, “Plump + Go” features someone who actually isn’t wearing makeup. That’s because she’s a model preparing to be injected with four different substances—Botox, Perlane, Cosmoderm, and Restylane. So there are at least four reasons none of us look anything like the women we see in magazines.

Continuing the trend of making over people who don’t really need making over, “6 Weeks to Slim” pairs two magazine staffers with trainers who, naturally, impose ultra-strict quasi-scientific edicts. Do they lose weight? Yes. Did they need to lose it in the first place? Nope! Both have BMIs within the normal range.

Admittedly, the BMI is a flawed calculation. Fine. But this depiction of two slim women getting slimmer alongside a “Dress Yourself Thin” coverline and a food diary from manicurist Ji Baek, whose diet consists largely of champagne—it all sends a powerful message about our bodies.

It says that our bodies aren’t ours—they’re open for public comment. That they don’t exist for our pleasure or strength but instead that they are a source of shame. That starvation and sacrifice are the path to self-satisfaction.

As long as our bodies and faces belong not to us but to an ever-changing, ever-more-impossible standard, women will be going to war with themselves.

Wouldn’t it be a pleasant surprise to see a magazine emphasize being healthy and strong instead of slender and young? Wouldn’t it be great to see a magazine stop referring to “boyish” figures, as if those women somehow aren’t female enough, and stop altogether ignoring larger women? Wouldn't it be a positive change to see a fashion spread focus on flattery instead of camouflage?

Absolutely. But I’m not holding my breath. To accomplish anything other than selling insecurity, InStyle Makeover would need a makeover of its own.

Lowest Common Denominator: Allure, August

33,683: Number of free items Allure is giving away in August, according to the cover

10: Pounds lighter, years younger, and times happier editor-in-chief Linda Wells claimed to appear after a bra fitting

$39.95: Price of faux-leather strapless dress from H&M that’s named as a “must” in “Fashion Cravings”

0: Probability, estimated, that any major magazine’s fashion editor has ever actually worn faux leather from H&M

Far, far too much: According to swimwear designer Malia Mills, the amount of maintenance a suit needs to avoid fading and stretching. Daily rinsing and a secondary suit just for wear in hot tubs? Like it isn’t hard enough to find one!

95: Page on which an advertisement for Latisse appears, asking “Not enough lashes?”

Boundless: The joy I’m apparently missing by not sleeping with my hairstylist, according to “Dirty Blondes.” The article claims stylist-client affairs are a “female pasha fantasy”

Heaps: Amount I loved “Time Warp” on page 141, wherein a fashion historian and a history professor discuss the realism of period-movie hair and makeup. More like this, please!

6: In “The New Cocoon,” number of items made of fur, including oh-so-practical shearling gauntlets

None: Amount of the diet advice in “The Fashion Insiders’ Diet” that’s novel to anyone who’s read a women’s magazine before. Really? Eat a piece of fruit before going out to dinner?

Tons: Disbelief inspired by this sentence in the diet’s introduction: “Models aren’t the only ones who feel pressure to be thin, and fitting into a sample size can sometimes feel like a job requirement—if not exactly a virtue—when you work in fashion.” Because, you know, that's just the way it is.

1989: Year from which Allure must have stolen the fluorescent-themed fashion spread “Plugged In”

Subtle Ad for Hair Removal Products Promotes "Mowing the Lawn"

What's most troubling about this commercial? Is it the unoriginal use of cats to represent the female anatomy? The racial stereotypes? The notions that pubic hair is "untidy" and "rough around the edges" and fun to remove? Or the fact that some executive thinks this commercial is a brilliant way to convince us to buy the product?

(Spotted at Feministing)

Deep Cover: Noteworthy Stories from the Newsstand

Occasionally, I read something other than fashion magazines! Even so, topics that relate to some of the most frequent complaints about the glossies arise frequently. I’ve culled these points of interest from recent readings:

The February issue of Wired graphed the BMIs of Playboy centerfolds from December 1953 to January 2009, and then compared the results to the BMI of the average American woman over the same time period. The outcome won’t surprise you: The models’ BMI shrank from 19.4 to 18.2, while the national average increased from 22.2 to 26.8. Wired points out that, while the stats could be skewed because the Playmates provide their own weights and measurements, what Playboy thinks its readers will consider ideal is far more revealing than the actual numbers.

 

The March issue of Psychology Today probes the growing frequency of suicide among teen girls. A new book, The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today's Pressures, postulates that society and the media subject girls to unrealistic pressures, creating strain when girls are expected to become caregivers, excel academically, and still fit conventional standards of beauty. Female role models, the book’s authors claim, are “ultra-sexy, ultra-feminized women, like the female surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy or swimsuit-modeling tennis players…” Ultra-sexy, ultra-feminized women? Like, say, the Photoshopped images that appear in fashion magazines?

 

And speaking of Photoshop, the editor-in-chief of Shape answered readers who wrote to complain about what they thought was the egregious retouching of singer Faith Hill’s bikini-clad body on an earlier cover. In March’s “Editor’s Letter,” Valerie Latona says, “I can emphatically and truthfully say we do not alter stars’ bodies: We select A-listers, like Jaime Pressly (whom we voted this year’s Sexiest Body in Hollywood), who are healthy role models—and have the curves to show for it.” In response to readers’ correspondence, the magazine says, “We never alter any Shape model’s body—including those on our cover. The women we feature put a lot of hard work into staying healthy and should be given the credit they deserve.”

Eva Longoria Dyes Her Hair at Home and Other L’Oréal Lies

The award for the most moronic advertisement in recent memory goes to the spread for Excellence To-Go hair color by L’Oréal Paris, as seen in the current issue of InStyle and on display in drugstores everywhere. What, you ask, could be so terrible about an ad for hair dye—other than, you know, furthering this ludicrous notion that we women are supposed to coat our scalps in a potentially toxic substance every few weeks so as not to offend anyone with a gray hair or two?
 

    

Well, for starters, there’s this manufactured quote from Eva Longoria:

Today, everything moves so fast, my haircolor has to be perfect. And it has to keep up.

This is going to torture me. No exaggeration: I may lie awake tonight wondering how hair dye is supposed to “keep up.” How can haircolor do anything other than smell wretched and stain my forehead? With what or with whom is it expected to keep up? And how offensive is it to pretend that Eva Longoria doesn’t have a personal hairstylist touching up her roots every six minutes?

Then there’s the “so fast” part of the statement. Yes, the world moves so insanely fast, MY HAIRCOLOR MUST ADAPT INSTANTLY. What? This is a product that is supposed to have a permanent effect. It does not change. There is nothing fast about hair dye except the speed with which it stains the paint on the
bathroom wall.

The adjoining page gets even worse, somehow:

Rich color in 10 MINUTES. Hair that feels STRONGER. For me, that’s a NEW REVOLUTION!

For me, this constitutes a compelling reason to NITPICK! And to RANT!

The nitpick: revolutions are by their very nature new. And the rant: co-opting the language of revolution to sell the very products whose necessity feminism rejects is absolutely noxious. I’ll take my revolutions in the form of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, thank you, not in hair color that shaves a whopping 5 minutes from competing brands’ processing time and is marketed to me as if coloring my hair every six weeks since age 18 has actually slaughtered 75 percent of my brain cells. (Never mind the possibility that, well, it has.)

Finally, there’s L’Oréal’s trademark:

Because you’re worth it.

Actually, L’Oréal, we’re worth more than that. If only your advertising reflected as much.

Lucky's "Beauty Strategies" Take Luxury for Granted

Have you seen the MTV show Exiled? Starring the spoiled kids from My Super Sweet 16, the program plucks them from their posh surroundings, sentencing them to a short-term stay with a family far less privileged than their own. (They even have to do chores!) In theory, this is a show about loosening the kids’ grip on material possessions, forcing them to gain a little perspective, and teaching them to appreciate their wealth.

So, then, isn’t it a little strange that the producer of Exiled would appear in the January issue of Lucky magazine, a publication that seemingly exists solely to celebrate the acquisition of overpriced bagatelles, to reveal the $105 face cream she always travels with and discuss how beauty products make her feel “so much better”?

An InStyle Assessment of Purchasing Priorities

This appears on page 246 of the December issue of InStyle:

Thanks, InStyle! Like so many women across the nation, I was only driving to work because I was completely ignorant that I could trade my gas money for a fancy potion from Saks! It had nothing to do with the fact that there is no other way to get to my office! How can we former car commuters ever pay you back for pointing out that we should be taking public transport? Preventing potential wrinkles clearly trumps any other concern.

Next month, InStyle answers whether you should buy a month’s worth of groceries or a new jar of eye cream. Hint: Obviously, the eye cream. They think you’ll look much better after eating nothing but whatever dented canned goods you can manage with the change you find on the sidewalk. A bout with food poisoning is a very effective weight loss method!

Lowest Common Denominator: Lucky, November

$2.99: Lucky’s cover price

$30: Suggested retail of Kim France and Andrea Linett’s new book, “The Lucky Guide to Mastering Any Style,” excerpted in the November issue

97%: Oddly enough, the amount of content in those excerpted pages that looks exactly like every single issue of Lucky

1: Number of times each that the alleged word “fashiony” is applied to the Gap and Banana Republic

2: Staffers who publicly admit to “converting” to Jessica Simpson’s new fragrance, Fancy, after Simpson appeared on October’s cover

31.5: Months, at the current rate of 2 employees per month, until the rest of the editorial staff is engulfed in the Great Simpson Perfume Convergence

10: Brands of non-Simpson perfume advertised in this issue, including—so help me—Fairy Dust by Paris Hilton

“Hugely”: Amount powder could potentially change your appearance, according to “Loose Powder: How and Why” in “Beauty Spy”

3: Number of “dramatically different looks” that can be achieved simply by using a different mascara, according to page 144 of “Beauty Spy”

47: Other life issues, approximately, I need to tackle before I’ll have even the slightest motivation to test  on my own face Lucky’s gripping hypotheses about the transformative powers of cosmetics 

“All the time”: Frequency with which beauty editor Jean Godfrey-June buys “things [she] can’t afford,” as divulged in “The Beauty Closet”

$86,483: Total retail value of all jewelry featured in “The Lucky Fall Jewelry Guide”

56: Number of adjectives and adjectival phrases in “The Season’s Best Coats”

26: Number of apparel items described by those 56 terms

30: Even more meaningless descriptors—like “nonchalant crisp” and “cozy meets flirty”—applied to the ensembles in “A Month of Outfits”

Infinite: Desperation emanating from the pop-up that screams “WAIT! SUBSCRIBE TO LUCKY!” when leaving Lucky’s website

Glamour Undermines Its Under-the-Skin Message

The October edition of Glamour is all about age. You know, it’s the issue where they divide women into incredibly broad and stereotypical categories based on one small facet of our existence and then expect us conform exactly to one of those groups.

Oh, wait, that’s every issue.

I’ll start with the upper right hand of the cover:

Love Your Looks

Rachel Bilson, Ali Larter & Diane Lane Tell How

Awesome. There’s nothing I love more than a woman on the cover of a fashion magazine explaining to me how I can learn to appreciate my appearance. The obvious: If I resembled one of those three, I’d have no trouble loving my looks.

So what enlightenment does this trio offer? Let’s check out “Gorgeous at Any Age” to find out!

Rachel Bilson is dubbed “Confident at 27.” Well, wouldn’t you be confident if you could be described the way she is?

She’s already starred in a successful TV series, The O.C., bought a home and launched a brand new fashion line for DKNY Jeans…[To Rachel] You’re a young woman with a successful career at an age when a lot of your peers are starting out. You probably have a little money in the bank and a sense of direction about what’s coming next.

See how easy it is to feel good about yourself? Just star in a TV show and design a clothing line in conjunction with a major apparel label! There is one glimmer of hope here, though: 27 is considered young!

It gets better, though. Next up, Ali Larter, who is “Sexy at 32”! (Sexy, eh? Like women of 32 are typically asexual prunes?) Here’s what she has to say about the purported subject of this section:

I actually think I look better now [than when she was in her twenties] because I feel so much better about myself now. And that’s what’s so exciting. As you get older, you get better…Look at all these incredible women, like Vanessa Redgrave, who are still so beautiful. The reason is because they embrace who they are.

That may be the healthiest, most reasonable attitude about aging ever printed in a women’s magazine.

Finally, there’s the “Red-Hot at 43” Diane Lane, who offers a similarly sensible approach:

...there is something wonderful about coming to terms with time—that it is finite. You want to have as much joy in your life as possible, and you take responsibility for your own joy.

How does Glamour follow up all this talk about surrendering to the inevitable and learning to respect yourself? With two pages full of expert advice, makeup, and skincare products to “work your looks.”  Loving yourself is spectacular, but you’d like yourself even more if you got rid of that frizzy hair and applied some bronzer!

Admittedly, appreciating “the skin you’re in now” involves loving your actual skin. But if self-esteem starts on the inside, as the rest of the article suggests, shouldn’t the advice for developing that go beyond, well, skin deep? I think so, but that’s probably because I haven’t shelled out for the Glamour-endorsed $155 anti-aging cream. Hey, why bother developing inner beauty at all? There's always someone at the cosmetics counter willing to sell it to me in a jar.