How Diverse Are The Major Magazine's April 2018 Covers?
"Representation matters!"
"Representation is really really important!"
"This is why representation is a necessity!"
No matter how you say it, it all boils down to the same fundamental idea: people want to see themselves reflected in mainstream images. At NUDEST we get it, our brand is literally based on that idea that representation should be accessible to everyone regardless of skin tone. Unfortunately this isn't standard in any industry, but the media seems to have a particularly difficult time representing a spectrum of complexions. Even though there are some victories, it still feels like for every step we take forward, we seem to take two steps back.
We wanted to find a way to examine how diverse representation in the media space is, so we decided to look at 15 monthly magazines and see how many times each of the six major NUDEST skin tones appear on these covers.
Lena Waithe
Lena is Rich.
Yara Shahidi
Yara is Medium.
Cardi B
Jessica Alba
Jessica is Medium.
Cardi is Medium.
Kendall Jenner
Kendall is Fair.
Demi Lovato
Demi is Medium.
J. Lo
Jennifer is Medium.
Adwoa Aboah
Adwoa is Medium.
Rowan Blanchard
Rowan is Light.
Diddy
Diddy is Deep.
Kim Kardashian
Kim is Medium.
Alicia Vikander
Mary J. Blige
Mary is Deep.
Alicia is Medium.
Shia LaBeouf
Shia is Light.
Camila Cabello, Elle Fanning and Aja Naomi King
Camila is Medium, Elle is Fair, and Aja is Rich.
Of the 15 covers we looked at, there 17 celebs featured on the cover. We ran each of them through our NUDEMETER and 2 of them were fair, 2 were light, 9 were medium, none were tan, 2 were dark and 2 were rich.
On a surface level, it was nice that five of the six groups were represented, but as you can see more than half of were in the media skin tone category. Ethnically Yara Shahidi, Cardi B, Kim Kardashian and Alicia Vikander are all different, so that allows women of different races to be reflected...if they have a medium skin. April could have been better but it definitely could have been worse.