Magazine Cover Overload!

You can’t help yourself. You are standing there idly, waiting your turn at the checkout and the words and photos jump right out and slap you in the face. Before you know it, you pick up a magazine and start leafing through the shiny pages, skimming for the article that caught your eye. 

Is there time for you to discover the secrets from within the publication before you check out?

Do you pay the five bucks and learn how to have rock hard abs or fantastic hair? Do you want to please your man (what about pleasing women?) or learn who is dying off in the next episode of your soap opera?

Do you look to see who is watching you before you pick up the tabloid rags that claim Elvis is alive, and then dead, and then alive again? Or, that aliens landed and gave birth to Miley Cyrus?

It is the sleek magazine cover that draws you in as you seek only to pay and get out of the store. It beckons you with air brushed perfection images of women --who in real life have wrinkles, cellulite, and bulges but these flaws have been eradicated leaving only the illusion of the a woman the photo initially captured.

Grocery store magazine racks are aimed perfectly at grabbing our attention, promising us all kinds of miracles if we only buy the publication and read it.

For research, I wrote down some of the cover headlines from one week. Disturbing, but this is make believe science.

If I read these articles, would my life change dramatically? I am promised income for life, fifteen pounds shed, sexy make-up and the best love life ever!

Oh, if only. Who knew the solutions to all my vanity was right before me all this time and all I had to do was pick up a magazine.

The headlines promised so much.

One teased, Look Hot from Behind. Gee, and all these years I worked hard to be hot from the front. I think a one-sided hotness can be more damaging to your dating life. Why? Have you ever seen a person with a tight, toned great body and then they turn around and the contradicting face nearly knocks your head around?

It would have been better if I had been prepared. Great expectations give way to great disappointments.

Another magazine proclaimed, The Haircut that works for everyone; so I began picturing famous people with the same haircut. Everyone? Really? Should Jennifer Aniston, known for having the hairstyle that caught every girl’s eye, now wear the same Mohawk that Miley Cyrus sports?

In the 70s, every woman’s hair style was either the Dorothy Hamill

wedge or the Mrs. Brady shag. Thankfully, today’s fashion dictates that individualism rules. No more one size (or style) fits all.

Another magazine promised, Shrink your belly in 14 days and added melt your muffin top while another similar bode, Shed two sizes.

Nearly every cover promoted some sort of weight loss or get in shape taunt. If only the magazine would have guilted me before I loaded my shopping cart with potato chips, ice cream and beignet mix.

For two years I subscribed to Self magazine and each issue was stuffed full of how to lose pounds, how to crunch my way to sexy abs, millions of words promoting a healthy diet all with a cover of a beautiful female celebrity smiling at me, laughing at me because she knows I am only going to peruse through the pages and never do a thing recommended in the publication.

Then there are the magazines who want to make us feel better. Blessed brutal honesty! They console us with distorted photos and headlines that read, Over injected celebrities, Celebrities without makeup, or match the Cellulite to the celebrity.

Do we can feel better about ourselves seeing the beautiful--not so beautiful?

These entertainment magazines also want us to feel better about our common ordinary life drama by giving us all the weekly gossip on the celebrities. Again, for research, STAR magazine’s cover screamed, Tim & Faith, Marriage from Hell, She’s a controlling Psycho. From now on, we will carry the bad speculation of those words with us. Forget the truth, the smoke and mirrors make better stories.

Love advice is also within the pages of the magazines such as Always the friend, never the girlfriend. Can you fix that?

Headlines that read, Congress Hires Exorcist means you have left the world of creditable publications and have entered the Twilight Zone of tabloid publications.

All bets are off with the creative and freaky style of shock writing. It’s okay to read the headline, but then, step back, …way back.

Reading the magazine covers is just a form of checkout line entertainment. It may leave you feeling self conscious about the pounds you need to lose, or self doubt because a celebrity who is twenty years older than you is aging better than you are, or you may feel bored that your bedroom life isn’t reflected as in the Cosmopolitan titles.

Don’t forget the house and garden covers which reveal a lifestyle that you probably will never get to experience either. Your home may have the lived in look they never put on the cover of magazines. Dust, toys, extra clutter does not make appealing cover shots.

My magazine headline advice: The key to being satisfied with your life is to ignore magazine covers while in checkout lines.

The covers may offend, depress, amuse or just darn right make you angry. But to actually read the articles?


I ain’t got time for that.