FameCrawler : redbook

Foodie Giada de Laurentiis Covers Redbook and Rachel Ray

Karl Erikson — Mon, 25 May 2009 14:34:00 GMT

What I really want to see is a Food Network Catfight between Giada De Laurentiis and Rachel Ray. Guess I'll have to wait for another day. Mommy Giada covers Redbook magazine and talked a little about her reported fighting with Rachel Ray.

"Do we hang out all the time? No," Giada says. "Are we best friends? No. But if you’re not best friends, people assume that you hate each other. We laugh about it. We do these festivals together, and she’ll say to me, ‘Oh, we’d better take a picture together and smile, because if we don’t, God only knows what’s going to get written about us.’ She’s a lovely person."

Giada also talks a bit about her daughter Jade, now 1. She's not a fussy eater, Giada says. "She loves grilled lamb chops and eats quinoa." Quinoa? What the hell is quinoa? Getting children to eat healthy food is important, she says. "You have to make food fun."

As for being "too sexy" for a cooking show, Giada says, "I think it’s okay to cook and be sexy. Why not? I do get a lot of emails from women, saying to me, ‘You don’t have to show cleavage to get the male audience.’ I don’t need to. That’s just how my body type is, and I’m very comfortable with what I have."

You naysaying women can shut your mouths. I'm very comfortable with what Giada has, too.

Source

Which Celebrity Mom Is Dishing On Her Sex Life?

HerBadMother — Wed, 14 May 2008 19:24:00 GMT

Let's see: she says that the primary thing that her exes (and ex-bedmates) have in common is that they're all "bad boys." Oh, and, also, they all "have dark hair and are passionate in bed."

According to Denise Richards, Charlie Sheen, John Stamos and Richie Sambora were all good in bed. Shame about John Stamos, though: "(he) didn't want to be with a woman who had children so that's like out the door," Denise says during her reality show (not yet aired). "We had a good time though!"

Richards' reality show debuts on E! on Memorial Day and will feature her daughters – Sam, 3, and Lola, 2 – from her marriage to Sheen. She insisted recently, though, that putting her kids in front of the camera isn't exploitation. I suppose, too, that naming your exes and describing their talents in bed isn't exploiting your sexual history, either. You go Denise!

Source

Denise Richards is Tugging at My Heartstrings

sweatpantsmom — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:35:00 GMT

Poor Denise Richards. What with the husband stealing and the sperm hoarding, she's got a lot on her, uh, hands. Now it seems even her efforts to exploit her children are weighing heavy on her. Damn you world!

Richards whines that she's in a 'no-win' situation with her upcoming reality show Denise Richards: It's Complicated. "If I have my kids on my show, I'm exploiting them," the actress says in an interview with Redbook. "If I don't, people will think I'm not a hands on mom – That's why it's very important to me that the girls are part of it."

Somebody stop the madness! What kind of society do we live in that makes it difficult for a self-absorbed, batshit crazy actress to make a few hundred-thousand-dollars off the backs of her children? Hang in there Denise - I'm confident it'll get easier and easier to sell out your children for a few Prada handbags and a nice chunk of real estate in Montecito.

The Faith Hill Photo Lie

BadKitty — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:37:00 GMT

Jezebel brought down a sh*t storm last week when they posted these Faith Hill before and after shots from her recent Redbook cover. The interwebs were aflame as everyone scrambled to board the Outraged Express: How dare the media propagate this kind of lie? The real Faith looked better! When will the truth become our common currency? (Answers: because it makes them rich, yes sort of, and check back on the 10th of Never.)

Everyone is right. The retouching is offensive. But why is everyone so surprised? We've seen dramatic examples of this before.

Remember the Dove Evolution commercial where they showed how to make a perfectly beautiful model even more beautiful, from lighting to hair, makeup and retouching? Here is another video from YouTube that shows "extreme retouching" in which everyone gets a new eye color. Search Google for "retouching examples" and you'll find links like this. Stacy Morrison, editor-in-chief of Redbook, responded to the Jezebel induced frenzy by saying what they did was industry standard retouching. Sadly, that's true.

The thing that fries my bacon is the more intricate lie that goes along with the cover photo that every "knows" is retouched. Read the words that go with the picture and tell your brain how to interpret that openly fake photo. In marketing we call it positioning, but you can just think of it as The Story They Want You to Buy. And I do mean buy.

Stacy Morrison blogged about the photo shoot that resulted in The Cover Seen Round the Internet. She calls Faith "genuine" and refers to how photographers make subjects look good with "lighting and whatnot." In two simple sentences, she positions what you see as the real deal because Faith = genuine, and anything done to make the photo look better as a combination of good light (OMG those pink light bulbs work wonders!) and some technical adjustments too minor to actually name.

Inside the issue is a Q&A with Faith and Tim. The first paragraph sets the readers' perceptions and experience by calling the pair "unfiltered," i.e. believe that what you see is what you get, without artifice or manipulation. This is right under another obviously Photoshopped image of Faith.

In the Q&A the two talk about their kids, balancing family with work, and a lot about food. Southern comfort food, yummy, delicious carb-filled goodness. Subtext: Faith is a Mom with like you, she has the same concerns that you do, she eats the kind of food you like, and she looks like that picture. The stars are just like us! If you try hard enough you can eat that way and have that amazing body. Without wrinkles! But of course you need help, everyone does, and you can figure out how to buy the right diet book, botox or skinny pill by reading the magazine.

Redbook picked Faith to be on their cover to leverage her personal brand of accessible, authentic Mom and turn readers who identiy with her into consumers through Faith's tacit endorsement of everything in the publication. Redbook reinforces Faith's brand through positioning (she's so down to earth!) and provides visual cues of what we're conditioned to desire (skinny and good hair.) Then the magazine is packed with ads for things that by association will make you just like the picture of Faith on the cover. The fact that it's fake and perpetually unattainable means we're all doomed to be repeat buyers. Genius!

I wonder what Faith thinks about all this. If she's selling her image this way on purpose, or if she's being manipulated like the rest of us. And I wonder how she explains things like this to her three daughters.

Mostly I wonder how much longer we're all going to be willing dupes to the photos and the words and the marketing. I think it's time to cancel a couple of magazine subscriptions and see if that gets anyone's attention.

Photo credit: Jezebel