A. Phillips 2008-11-16
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
After casually flipping through Cosmo while waiting in line at the grocery store when I was in college, I finally decided to subscribe, and boy did I regret it. I was hoping to enjoy Cosmo as my monthly guilty pleasure, but what I got was an incredibly banal reading experience. The fashion, hair, and skin tips are not bad, but similar advice can easily be found in several better magazines.
Cosmo however, became a cultural staple because of the promise of its cover teasers. Yet, for anyone over the age of 14, the articles that these teaser headlines offer are uninformative and generally useless. By the third month of my subscription I realized that if you read one issue of Cosmo, you really don't need to read another one. They are all the same! Cosmo masquerades as an empowering lifestyle magazine for fashionable women in their 20s, but as a woman in that demographic, I found this magazine to be a colossal bore of recycled (not to mention really prosaic) sex-tips and retrograde advice that will set women back a good forty years. Needless to say, I did not renew my subscription. I subscribed to Self and Women's Health instead, and am much more impressed with their overall content. I will however warn that Self and WH are low on beauty and fashion content, so I am thinking about subscribing to Glamour or Marie Claire to compensate for these shortcomings.
