Our mail box was filled with this today:
Two pounds of InStyle magazine. Now, most would probably cheer and not be able to wait to plop on the couch, inhale some chocolate, and delve in.
All I thought was: “Okay, that’s it!”
This is the last time I’m subscribing to a fashion magazine!
Because I knew that most of the weight came from advertising pages, which I flip through and don’t give a second glance to anyway because the models look like no real woman looks and usually those ads are so freaking stylized that the clothes isn’t even shown and you wonder what the ad is for.
Big eyebrows? Contortionists?
What ticked me off when I lugged that magazine up the driveway was the waste of resources to have this magazine printed and delivered a million times around the world.
This issue announced proudly how many pages it had on the front cover: 652. My personal carbon footprint just went to shits today by subscribing to this dang magazine.
I counted 30 pages of ads before the Contents page! Remember when that was on page 3 or 4?
To prove my point about the overload of ads in fashion magazines, I pulled out every single page that had editorial content. Here is the result:
On the left: the editorial pages, but bare in mind that the other side still has an ad on it.
And on the right you have the rest of the magazine, all pages with ads on them on the front and back. Even if you threw out the whole right side, you’d still end up with a magazine full of ads.
I counted the editorial pages: there are 180. Now, I know that magazines are not about the writing — they get published to sell advertising space, that’s where the money is. And I enjoy the editorial content in InStyle, but 500 pages of ads about clothes, shoes, and jewelry the average woman can’t afford or would never wear is ridiculous and just annoying.
My subscription is running out next month, and I wasn’t going to renew it anyway because I don’t have time to rifle through 500 ad pages of emaciated girls. This mama is busy.
Plus, this is what I do now: I borrow magazines from the library. And while Landon is playing there, I grab my favorite magazine, Country Living, and if I find something I want to remember, I take an Instagram picture of that page.
I really liked this idea for easy DIY curtains and took a picture of it…
…and the part of the article explaining how they were made. Just in case you were following me on Instagram (DagmarBleasdale) and were wondering about my random pictures. I use Instagram as a vision board.
Voila, another tree saved, and I have the information backed up on my computer and can pin it to my Pinterest boards.
Tomorrow, I’m calling InStyle to stop with the incessant “Please come back!” mailings that are sure to follow, wasting more precious resources.
What do you think of the overload of ads in fashion magazines?
