Business

Skin magazines

So what if you’re glued to the couch for the rest of the Olympics? At least you can look your best while doing so. Let these magazines coach you to a gold.

Allure keeps its allure without being saucy like sister rivals strutting their sex cover stuff. Devoting its main cover spreads to female fundamentals of great hair, nail and skin tone, Allure makes only a tame hint at, you know, sex, with a cover piece: “Body Language Decoder — Silent Signal…or Just a Twitch?” For example, how a woman stands, whether pigeon-toed or with arms crossed, sends a powerful message about her intentions. To help master a moment, try smiles, slight eyebrow lifts, or a hand placed across your heart a beat before speaking. One helpful hint before a date, practice standing in a power pose with your legs apart and hands on your hips, for a full two minutes. It helps reduce the stress hormone, cortisol, and boosts the testosterone level for more buzz. At least you’ll look great from all the beauty advice.

Cosmo is still queen of the sex quizzes and tips. This month the magazine claims to even outdo itself with the naughtiest sex article ever, inspired by guess what? Yep, “Fifty Shades of Grey.” There’s also another installment of Cosmo’s serial fiction story that mimics the book that made sado-masochism mainstream. But the magazine should stick to the basics, where it’s at its best — how to appreciate your boobs.

Award-winning Marie Claire is known to sprinkle real journalism between those sex tips. But the August issue disappoints with an issue that was way too fashion-focused and reads at points like one, big glossy ad. Still, the cover with former SNL funny lady Kristen Wiig is sure to draw readers. The profile inside is overly fawning and not very insightful, but we love the pics of Wiig looking sexy, especially the moody black-and-whites. In the back is the issue’s best work, including an article on the dangers of veganism (binging on junk food) and a piece by a woman who claims she and her husband have sex every day despite having three kids. Yeah, she’s a freak show, ladies, but that’s why we read.

As sex advice books go, the August edition of Glamour is pretty tame. Sadly, there’s no list of things to make your man go crazy in bed or other uses for scrunchies. Editors did order up an advice column on how to make men feel loved — give them a foot massage?! Slightly racier, a piece on what he thinks when he sees you naked. Confidence is better than fake boobs. There’s an intriguing feature on a woman who comes from four generations of prostitutes, and we learn from cover girl Mila Kunis that she’d rather have a baby than be in a big movie.

The New Yorker likes lengthy analyses of what happened six or 12 months ago. This week we get features on Burma’s move toward democracy and US Congressman Paul Ryan’s rise in the GOP. A better bet is its feature on a small-town dentist who allegedly has cheated repeatedly in marathons. At the Boston Marathon, Kip Litton had changed clothes when he crossed the finish line. “No one but Litton could say how he did it,” the article concludes, somewhat disappointingly.

New York’s double issue is devoted to “Sex: the Multiplicity of Desire.” Predictably, there’s an element of Ivy League-flavored reportage, with a sex-party hostess who ‘finds the terminology “sex party” reductive and degrading.” There’s a piece on a three-man “throuple” that produces gay porn, but whose “home life seems positively wholesome,” with remarkably little interpersonal tension. Not much insight is gleaned, however, into how the participants manage to pull this off, no pun intended.

Time, meanwhile, happens this week to deliver a far more convincing portrait of a Utah polygamist and his three wives. “The level of commitment is so much higher,” says Joe Darger, a very busy man. “If I cheat, I’m cheating on three people.” Elsewhere, Joe Klein delivers an argument on why gun control isn’t likely to gain much traction after the Colorado shootings. For those of us who aren’t necessarily disturbed by that, there’s an article about “the creeping disaster of drought.”

Newsweek runs a story by Joan Juliet Buck, who was disgraced after writing a puffy cover story for Vogue on the chic wife of Syria’s murderous dictator, Bashar el-Assad. The article, a marvel of 20/20 hindsight, has a few choice words for the Assads. But it fails to name names when railing against Vogue, which Buck claims published the piece in February despite her worries about nasty breaking headlines from the Middle East. She and Tina Brown, evidently, find Anna Wintour scarier than any number of blood-thirsty tyrants.