It’s possible to find a copy of Esquire magazine with the lights out, not because they print it with some sort of glow-in-the-dark ink, but because it reeks. The copy that arrived at my house last week had no less than four cologne ads inside, and my magazine smells like the proverbial French whorehouse.
I don’t wear cologne, so I’m not likely to peel these things open and give them a test run. And besides the unholy stench, there’s another problem: the pages with cologne ads are printed on heavier stock. This interferes with the tactile experience of handling a magazine and leafing through the pages — and if you ask me, magazines these days should take care not to make reading them on paper annoying.
The solution? Tear the damn things out. Now when I get the magazine the first thing I do is go through and rip out the cologne pages. Ha! Take that you advertisers! Maybe that’s not so good for helping preserve print either, but come on!
On a related note, when I was growing up we had a mailman in our neighborhood who would sit and eat his lunch in the mail truck while reading people’s magazines. That always seemed a bit weird to me; I wondered if folks would find mayonnaise stains on the pages or have crumbs fall out when they opened them. And if your mailman smells heavily of men’s cologne, that me be another dead giveaway.
We get a daily (literally: ever – single – day) Macy’s flyer at our abode, and they too reek like the dickens. Perhaps most bothersome is the fetid mix of men’s and women’s eau de toilette ‘samples’ morphing into some heretofore unknown cloud of olfactory toxicity. I find cleaning the litter box to be less offensive.