Cosmopolitan Gets A Makeover

Yesterday I bought my first copy of Cosmo after 9 years. I remember buying my last one just before I relocated from my home town, Cape Town to Johannesburg. I suppose I got tired of all the gloss and what I thought at the time was impractical advise. What made me buy this one? This Barbados girl in a ridiculous multicoloured, mostly pink getup with preposterously red tresses is one of my favourite entertainers. She caught my eye and I thought, I wonder what this child is up to now? So I ended  up buying this once constant companion one more time.

Today while sitting at the laundry service, my washing machine kicked the bucket ( I sense a pun in here) I took it out of my bag and tore it out of its own plastic cover irritably....is this really necessary, do we not have enough plastic floating about already?

So anyway here I start paging through it and stopped on the Editors Note Page, this is as far as I got because now I'm typing this post to resume with my paging on another laundry day.
Firstly the editor is introducing a column that will be manned by......(what can I say) men. Prior to this I think they only had female writers and I just checked their staff directory and it does indeed look female. These two males (Matte Du Plessis and Sipho Hlongwane) have been given carte blanche over their column content, they are to say it like it is_ no holds barred. The editor seems to think that things have progressed to the stage where the female has to listen to what this other half thinks (her words). Is this chick for real?

I suppose there are merits to this idea but has she considered all the variables? Is it trully wise to tell a man to be as honest as possible? Do we really want to have it laid bear in permanent ink that they do indeed think you could do with less protrusion at your posteria or that they would rather be ice fishing than going sofa shopping with you or that their mother is the prototype from which all females were to be modeled but somewhere along the line things went horribly wrong, or all the other things we like to pretend they don't think? Do we really want to see all that and worse in hard print. Hhhhhmmmm! I suppose we could get to understand the Marsians better, at least I hope that's the motivation behind it all.

The other interesting thing she mentions is that they are featuring their first hair giude for all sistas with ethnic hair. I can't wait to get to it, I just skimmed through and it looks very promising. This will certainly be a first in South Africa, a magazine doing thorough research and gives relevant advise on this issue. I wish the same could be done for ethnic skinn, there are so many face products any yet so difficult to  find decent, affordable products specifically designed for our skin types.

Anyway, it looks as though Cosmo is intent on a revamp and it couldn't have been better timed considering that a couple of months ago magazine sales figures were reported to have hit an all time low, this is after all considered by many to be a luxury item. I may just buy the August issue.