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The covers of four magazines – Marie Claire, HomeStyle, Your Home and Prima – did not feature a single person of colour throughout 2017.įor our study, we looked only at publications whose covers mostly featured people and based our calculations on covers that show only one person. But in two months in 2017, March and May, the front covers of every single title we analysed featured images of white people exclusively. The most diverse month was October, when two magazines showed a black model and one featured an Asian model on the cover. That’s only 9.3%, although 13.7% of the UK are BAME, according to the Office for National Statistics’ latest estimate, published in June 2016. Of 214 covers published by the 19 bestselling glossies last year, only 20 featured a person of colour.
The covers of some the UK’s most popular monthlies remain overwhelmingly white. New research by the Guardian’s data team shows how little has changed.
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Through ignorance and indifference, they frequently featured no one of black, Asian, mixed or any other ethnic minority heritage from cover to cover, while advice on makeup, skin care, hair styles and products was unfailingly irrelevant to us. Yes, I bought Just Seventeen, More, Marie Claire, Elle and Vogue, but the fact that I – and thousands of other women and girls of colour like me – spent our money on glossies did not mean they catered for us. As a mixed-race girl growing up in Britain in the 1990s, I might have still been in the era of empire, as far as my relationship with popular magazines was concerned. An illustration of Queen Victoria’s bust, surrounded by stylish women behaving as domestic role models, was credited with propelling Mrs Beeton’s The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine to bestseller status in 1857, earning it “more patrons than any other magazine in the Empire”, one newspaper said.
W omen’s magazine editors have always understood the importance of a good cover.