In my local M&S in Hammersmith there is a separate display featuring 16 glossy weekly and monthly magazines,all selling well or they would not have been selected. Clearly and equally visible were the 16 front covers pitching for the impulse buyer.

Editors know their stuff and each cover would have been created with expertise designed to both brand the title and arouse our interest.Carrying learnings from sales response from one issue to the next is their bread and butter. For me this made the celebrity sameness all the more depressing.

Only three stood out as different, Men’s Health with it’s familiar black and white ‘six-pack’, Vanity Fair with a classic Annie Liebowitz composition and GQ which featured a man, Colin Farrell. All the rest gave us female head-shots, cropped in much the same way, of a celebrity…..

…in no paticular order Kate Hudson, Kate Holmes, Alesha Dixon, Ashley Jenson, Amy Winehouse, Lilly Allen, Keira Knightly(twice),Mylene Klass, Suzanne Shaw, Anna Friel (twice) and the ubiquitous Kate Moss.( Posh where were you?)

Yes, celebrity sells ,and if it ain’t broke why fix it , but a touch more originality would be refreshing?