Beauty and Fashion is a very popular genre for magazines. These magazines stock the shelves everywhere. Cosmopolitan (Cosmo) is a beauty and fashion magazine that also provides sex and career advice. Cosmo’s websites states that the magazine is targeted towards cotemporary women ages 18-49. However, when reading this magazine, one can tell that is target towards primarily white contemporary women. Cosmo is a mainstream magazine that can be found everywhere. The magazine Essence is one that has a more specific audience and is not as mainstream. Essence is a lifestyle, fashion, and beauty magazine targeted towards African American women from the ages 18-54. The magazine coins the slogan “for the love of black women” The issues of the two magazines that I will be observing are from July 2015. Both are published twelve times a year. While Cosmo is circulated to almost 54,000 women each month, Essence is circulated to about 50,000 (Cosmopolitan Media Kit) (Essence Media Kit).

Although both magazines are of the same genre and sell for the same price of $3.99, they take different directions in what messages they send to their audience. This can be seen through examining the covers, cover headlines, and cover stories. The Cover of Essence features six African-American actresses from the show Orange Is The New Black. The women appear very elegant in their matching orange dresses. This is timely, as the newest season was just released on Netflix. Usually, Essence issues just feature one woman on the cover, but this issue is an exception. The covers calls the women “sexy at every size” as a preview to the cover story. Cover headlines also feature previews to articles about dancing and weight loss, as well as beauty tips. Cosmo, on the other hand, features hip-hop sensation Nicki Minaj posing in a very sexual manner. Although Cosmo often features white woman on their covers, as white women are their target audience, it tends to feature woman of all races and ethnicities on their covers. To preview the article about Nicki Minaj, Cosmo quotes her saying “I demand an orgasm every time”. The word sex is displayed largely on the cover, clearly pointing to another article about sex. Article headlines about working out, skin care, and dating also appear on the cover. Just by observing the cover graphics and headlines, one can tell that these two magazines will feature different content and messages. Essence definitely wants to promote the image of a healthy lifestyle while Cosmo focuses on the sexy side of a woman’s life. This difference can be seen when reading and evaluating the cover stories.

In the Essence cover story, each Orange Is the New Black actress takes time to tell the readers what she “love(s) about (her) body, mind, and spirit” (83). They reflect on everything from their workout habits, to their hair, to their feelings about their weight. All the images in the article portray the women as joyful and sophisticated. On the other hand, Cosmo decides to take a different approach. Cosmo’s cover story featured an interview with Nicki Manaj and multiple sexy photos of her. In the interview, Nicki discussed her career and sex life. She did discuss the struggles she went through in a breakup and how that influenced her album The Pinkprint, however, nothing too deep and personal was mentioned. Clearly these two cover sorties are very different. This I believe is because although the two magazines are of a similar genre, they decide to focus on different elements of the genre and send different messages, as one could see form examining the cover. Essence aims to include more lifestyle elements. Their cover story is clearly a beautiful lifestyle piece. Cosmo focuses on sex and career elements. This is why Nicki talks about her sex life and career, not so much deeper, personal topics.

So why do the publications make these different choices? The average age for consumers of Essence is forty-two years old women (Essence Media Kit). Forty-two year old women want to read about lifestyle choices, not sex or careers. They are probably already have experience in their loves lives and have a career or family. Reading about how other women deal with body image and living their every day lives is more appealing to a forty-two year old black women. The average age of consumers of Cosmo is thirty-four years old (Cosmopolitan Media Kit). Women in their thirties are still developing ideas and figuring out the real world. They want to know about different things in sex life and new careers they can look for. So even though both magazines attempt to reach the same age of women, their actual average age of consumers is different. These different ages persuade them to focus on different content and distribute different messages.

One similarity between the two magazines is that they both feature a style and beauty section. Even though the sections are formatted similarly, they are different page lengths and feature different products and styles. In their style section, Cosmo includes styles for all types of women. It has styles for hipsters, country girls, and even those celebrating the 4^th of July. However, Essence only highlights one look, which is a fun, colorful look for summer. Cosmo devotes almost ten pages for it style section while Essence allows about three. Why is this? Well, Cosmo does have more space to work with, as it is a 184-page issue. Essence is only 128 pages. Also, Cosmo has likely discovered through audience research that its target audience enjoys the style section. Maybe Essence’s audience has shown a greater interest in other areas. In the beauty section, Cosmo highlights products like Essie nail polish and Cover Girl mascara. It also includes two beauty articles: one about getting a nose job and another about protecting your skin after sunburn. Essence solely gives tips about summer makeup and highlights products like Bronze Goddess cream and Jurlique perfume. They both highlight the same Tom Ford product, however this is just one in the almost forty products that they both show. Although the sections feature different products and styles, their format makes them seem very similar.

When flipping through either of these magazines, one will notice the immense about of advertisements. Practically every page in each magazine includes one or two advertisements. The price to advertise in these magazines, however, is drastically different. For a one page ad it Essence, it is about $115,000 (Essence Media Kit). For the same amount of space in Cosmo, it is just over $300,000 (Cosmopolitan Media Kit). The advertisements in the magazines highlight beauty products, cars, food and drinks, and many other things. Nevertheless, the products that are featured and content in the ads are very different. In Essence, many of the featured models are African-American while in Cosmopolitan, many of the models are white. Clearly, this is because of the audiences the magazines aim to target. If one observes the advertisements for cars in the magazine, you will notice that Essence features brands like GMC, Nissan, Chevrolet, and Ford. Cosmo displays only one car advisement for Jeep. Clearly these brands are in the certain magazines because they are trying to target a certain market. Jeep is an expensive car, so they have decided to target an audience whose average income is almost $10,000 more a year than the readers of Essence (Cosmopolitan Media Kit) (Essence Media Kit). It is also interesting to compare the back cover advertisements of both magazines. The advertisement on the back of Essence is an ad is for Cover Girl. It includes three celebrities: one white, one black, and one Latino. On the back on Cosmo, a Dolce & Gabbana ad is featured. Again, this brings me back to the idea of money. Dolce & Gabbana is featured on the back of Cosmo rather than Essence because the target audience of Cosmo has an average higher income and Dolce & Gabbana tends to be an expensive product.

Essence and Cosmopolitan are both beauty and fashion magazines, but have different elements and send different messages that make them unique to their target audience. Overall, I was not expecting to connect with Essence as much as I did. Although the magazine may not have been targeted towards me, I understood the articles and connected with them. Even though the products in the advertisements may not have been geared towards me, the advertisements still got me thinking about the other products that the companies have that attract me. I learned that the audience targeted in Essence is very classy and sophisticated in comparison to that of Cosmo. Analyzing these magazines using media literacy taught me a lot about audience fragmentation. I never realized before how much thought media practitioners put into making magazines unique to target different segments of audiences. Although the magazines are similar, they have different elements that attract the different segments of the audience. In conclusion, I learned a lot about how advertisers, media practitioners, and magazine companies work to ensure their material appeals to their target audience.

Works Cited

“Cosmopolitan Media Kit – Fun Fearless Female.” Cosmopolitan Media Kit

Cosmopolitan. 2015. Web. 10 July 2015

“Essence Media Kit.” Essence.com. Time Inc., 11 Apr. 2013. Web. 12 July 2015