Glamour

Glamour

It's an exciting allure, high-fashion good looks and a magical spell.

By: Tracy Baker

BUS. Marketing

Glamour

Glamour is defined as an exciting allure: an irresistible alluring quality that somebody or something possesses by more exciting, romantic, or fashionable than ordinary people or things. It's no wonder why the company Condй Nast Publications decided to use the word glamour as the title for one of their many magazines. In the Condй Nast website they state, "They put a premium on truth," by "they," they are talking about the world-renowned editors, writers and photographers that work for them. At first look of the magazine, the main thing you notice is the photographs of the picture perfect models and or celebrities that are featured on the cover. We all now know that these picture perfect models are not nearly perfect. They are just regular people like you and I who are falsely touched up, brushed up to look flawless. Ever heard the phrase "nothing's perfect," well that's just it, nothing is perfect, not even the models on the covers of the magazines. They may look perfect and flawless but it's all planned to look that way. These so called ideal bodies and captivating high-fashion good looks are just the tools of the trade to lure us into buying this so called picture perfect look.

Not long ago, I too was also part of this glamour life. I would patiently wait for the monthly subscription of Glamour magazine, Elle Girl, and Allure, another magazine published by Condй Nast. I would always be looking forward to receive it because somehow I thought that by reading it, I would become just like the girls in the magazine; flawless and beautiful.

Glamour magazine and other magazines such as this one tend to have the same type of articles and topic. These are some examples: Do's & Don'ts, horoscopes and fun, fashion and beauty, health and body, polls and quizzes, and last but not least sex and love. So I guess what the publisher's and editors are trying to say is that a woman isn't a woman if they don't care about fashion, beauty, and sex.

In an article titled "Faking It, Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines," by Liza Featherstone, she talks about some of the great impacts that these kinds of magazines cause on young women. One of the issues she talks about is the overwhelming issues of sex. She says that life-style magazines like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, and others that most often run the most features dedicated to sex and relationship conundrums. She also mentions that such stories are embellished and tweaked. A woman who works for Glamour acknowledges that quotes are routinely rewritten. They get people to interview people than rephrase them so they can be interesting to the readers. Therefore these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism but in reality they are not news articles but fictional sex stories. It is unethical to do this but yet it is done over and over by other magazines not just Glamour.

Glamour is one of Condй Nast top selling magazines. The target audience for this magazine is young women from there early teens to late twenties. Also, there target audience would be the average Anglo female. Most of their photographs feature Caucasian women, and most of the advertising stories are on the Caucasian women.

As a consumer we are bombarded everyday with advertising. We are poked and prod to see what we like and what we want; some advertising fails and some advertising wins. The goal of the advertisers is to make us buy their featured product or at least make us aware of it. Such advertising is ubiquitous in magazines such as Glamour. In a one issue there are usually more advertisements for products and services than there are articles and stories. Why is that? I will tell you why; magazines earn their profit by selling pages of their magazines to companies who want to sell their products. So you see, magazines are not just selling themselves but others as well.

The goal of a magazine is to sell millions of issues each year. They entice you with the special promotion of buy 12 issues and 12 more issues for free. Additionally they will sometimes give you the opportunity to win a bag of cosmetics, or a free makeover if you are one of the first 1,000 customers to sign up. They are selling you a dream of becoming beautiful flawless woman, as well as the products that they feature in their articles. As a consumer you buy into this dream thinking that you will accomplish it just by buying the issue of the month.

The glamour, allure, charms and fascination of the Glamour Magazine is too irresistible to pass up sometimes; because of the appeal that entices us to become someone better, someone more beautiful and more attractive.

Women tend to think this way because its all we see in the media; nothing but beautiful, thin women with a