YOU KNOW I READ IT IN A MAGAZINE [407]

Each Saturday, I have ripped out and saved Caitlin Moran’s weekly column from “The Times” newspaper, one of my inspirations for these articles. Printed in their magazine, my cutting down the page’s sides, to fit into an A4 folder, is always a job for another time. A week ago, the shape of the magazine thinned down to A4 size, much to my approval. This change was prompted by the closure of the Prinovis printing plant in Liverpool in June 2023, leaving Walstead, owner of five printing presses, as the UK’s last large volume printer of magazines.

The rising cost of paper is as much a contributor to the declining circulation figures for magazines as the preference to read online. Popular titles like “Marie Claire”, “Glamour”, “Time Out” and “NME” are only found online in the UK, the latter two having relaunched as free magazines before withdrawing from print altogether. Others either print fewer issues a year, like “Cosmopolitan” (from monthly to bi-monthly) and “Time” (from weekly to fortnightly), while I stopped buying the “Radio Times” once the price of a weekly issue reached £4.00 in 2022, having reached the point for me where the time-limited use of a TV listings guide becomes too expensive to be a disposable item.

The only magazines I now buy regularly are the cheap and grimly functional “What’s On TV” because, like bus timetables, I find TV listings easier to read on paper; the aforementioned “Cosmopolitan”, whose annual subscription rate remained static as the number of issues per year dropped; and “Private Eye”, the satirical news magazine whose enduring cultural relevance, and “print first” publishing order, means its sales figures have never been higher. Any other magazine purchase either has to be for something I know I am going to keep, like the “Sight & Sound” decennial list of the greatest films of all time, or for a specific article I need to read for research – I would not create an online login in order to read one article from, say, “The New Statesman”, but I wouldn’t spend £5.50 on a print issue unless they provided me with a really good reason.

From my own behaviour, I can see traditional print magazines dissipating into two categories: online-only publications, and “bookazines”, the latter name currently applied to special-edition magazines on one subject, or compilations of previously printed material, whose presentation without advertising means the price approaches the £10-12 normally spent on a book, and more likely to be kept by its owner like a book. To that end, the music magazine “NME”, originally a weekly music newspaper and magazine until it became online-only in 2018, will introduce a bi-monthly premium magazine in 2023, “reprinting” online articles aimed at capturing a moment in time instead of what is coming next, with a limited print run and restricted availability to build scarcity and hype, and a cover price of £10, all aimed at people who will treat the magazine’s purchase like they would a vinyl record. That doesn’t sound like something that can be put in a recycling bin once you have finished reading it.

NOR ANY DROP TO DRINK [98]

This is the story of how I come across something, and the thought process that came from it.

Opening up the latest issue of a magazine I received in the post, I am used to there being a number of sachets or cards glued to pages to advertise new perfumes, shampoos and conditioners. I am also used to getting perfume on my fingers each month when I try to pick them off, which is a sure-fire way to make me not want to buy them later.

I then came across a large see-through sachet marked “Garner SkinActive Micellar Cleansing Water.” Garnier paid a magazine publisher to affix a bag of water to the inside of a product made of paper, and it was posted to me without leaking? I also liked the clarification that this was “cleansing” water, as if this was an extra quality that Garnier have been able to bring to the water. Perhaps this is me being a bit facetious, as the “micellar” bit must mean that some molecular engineering must have taken place, but if you are essentially claiming to have reinvented water, then I will look at you with both eyebrows raised.

The water came with instructions: to apply it to a cotton wool pad, and to wipe my face, eyes and lips with it. Because it was water, I did not need to rinse afterwards. I put the sachet to one side, and waited to use it until a point when I would come home from a particularly strenuous walk. It was time: I used a pair of scissors to cut open the sachet, as my fingers proved not to be strong enough. Bubbles formed at the exit point, as the water was soaked into a cotton wool pad. As water should do, it felt fresh on my face as I worked the pad over it. I looked at the results: it had picked up quite a bit of dirt. In short, it had acted as both a skin cleanser and as a make-up remover.

Here’s the science bit: micellar water is so called because it contains “micelles,” found here as cleansing oil molecules. In the same way that washing-up liquid or detergent works, the micelles reduce the surface tension of the water, making it easier for the water to pick up dirt, attaching to the micelles. Micellar water was first popularised in France, after its introduction by Bioderma in 1991, because it uses soft water, so the skin should not be dried out the same way that France’s naturally hard tap water would. It appears that micellar water was known only to the French for many years, as the first “what the hell is this about?” articles start appearing in English from about 2015.

Would I buy a bottle of the stuff? Once I finish up all the other stuff I bought that is said to work for my skin, I may consider it.