Editor's letter

Blogger is still not working!! Which means instead of seeing all the exciting beautiful things I am creating you will have to be content to read some articles and perhaps do a little proof reading? THANK YOU FANS

Snow white had an evil step mother. The great thing about characters in fairytales is that we are not really ever told much about them; this particular queen is ambitious and beautiful, but also vain. The moral of the story is that excessive vanity and self obsession will not only lead to a sticky end, but also put you down in history as the woman who talks to inanimate objects and poisons fruit to feed younger models. The ugly step sisters spent hours on getting ready for the ball, narcissus fell in love with his reflection, the argument between Athena, Aphrodite and Hera started a war lasting 10 years; vain characters litter the stories of our childhood, never as heroines but as the antagonist, causing hatred and ultimately self destruction. This is something we are warned against to such an extent that well into adulthood we find it difficult to accept compliments, we lie about how long it took us to get ready, we tell people “oh, it just dries naturally this way”. Perhaps attempting to eat the heart of anyone who dares become prettier than you takes things a little far, but could we all benefit from a little vanity?

Before putting together this issue we took a long hard look in the mirror and asked it, who really is the fairest of them all? We took time to be self indulgent, and admitted to it openly. We stood in a freezing field to take beautiful images. We enjoyed looking at our own reflections, not just in the mirror, but the reflection of ourselves in our articles and photo shoots. We realised that to embody the meaning of vanity, we have to be completely obsessed with every detail on every page, spending hours over perfecting images to be precisely right. A happy side effect of this is that the whole team’s group fanaticism and endless arguments over which images go into the final spreads, is that like the wicked queen, we are proud of what we have achieved.

You should know that I have designed some beautiful layout to go with this and it looks snazzy.

blame blogger, not me.