Editor: Karen Bokram
Publisher: Girls' Life Acquisitions Corp.
Copyright: 2011
ISSN: 10783326
Description
Girls’ Life is a fashion, beauty, and advice magazine aimed as middle and high school-aged girls. It has much more text per page than the other two magazines I reviewed for this project. There are four separate reader question-and-answer features, five advice features, two quizzes, one page of reader-submitted embarrassing stories, and three multipage articles. The table of contents is divided into the following areas:
- Fashion
- Beauty
- Boys, Besties & Life
- Health & Body
- GL Faves
Girls’ Life has lower production values than the other two magazines. Its pages are thinner and less glossy and have fewer photographs. The ads are exclusively teen-targeted instead of a mix of teen and adult, and all of the ad models appear to be teens. There are far fewer of them, too—out of 100 pages, just 20 are ads. Eight of these ad pages are for the Teen Read Week Book Club sponsored by the ALA.
Critical EvaluationGirls’ Life’s writing style is yet more obnoxious than Seventeen’s due to rampant use of abbreviations (e.g., fab, delish, brills, insta, etc., etc., ad nauseam). Like Seventeen, some of the features are falsely advertised. The item under the headline “7 Ways to Eat Whatever You Want (Seriously)” describes how to make lower-calorie choices in various situations—not a bad thing, but not exactly eating whatever you want, either. The other disturbing thing about this feature is that there’s no discussion of why you can’t just eat whatever you want. Is this about health, or is it a guide to getting started on disordered eating?
Most of the content is innocuous, though. The advice sections, though overly boy-focused, encourage girls to be nice and be smart. There are a couple of places for girls to get answers to health and body questions that are reasonably informative. But like in Seventeen, the token social issue article (here on teen addiction) is more titillating than informative. Finally, Girls’ Life ranks between Seventeen and Teen Vogue in terms of diversity and about the same as Seventeen in terms of promoted products’ affordability.
Why is this title included?
This title is a little more wholesome than other teen magazines, though it's still focused on the consuming topics of appearance and romance.