They usually consist of gossip, news, fashion tips and interviews and may include posters, stickers, small samples of cosmetics or other products and inserts.
Teen magazines are produced in many countries worldwide, and are widely popular in Australia, Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
In the United Kingdom, changes in the way teenagers spend their money (and the fact that there were fewer of them, though they had more cash) led to many casualties in the 1990s because titles were unable to compete with mobile, digital and online media.
[7] Compared to the rich superstar singer, and the skinniest model shown and praised in the magazine, the reader is most likely to be left with a negative self-image and a heavy desire to aspire to be just like the women they read about.
In recent years, rapid technological advancement and the rise of the Internet has led to the emergence of online teen magazines.
With a digital format, the accessibility of teen magazines has also greatly increased, reaching readers from a diverse range of backgrounds and nationalities.
Premature adolescence has proven to lead to a wide range of issues including body image, eating disorders, sexual violence, and self-esteem.
For example, Carpenter noted that Seventeen magazine offers traditional scenarios of sex by urging teenage girls to refrain from intercourse until love or marriage is present, yet the same magazine simultaneously offers recreational scenarios of sex in which teenage girls are encouraged to explore their sexuality before marriage and with multiple partners.
The embarrassing stories column that is popular in most, if not all, teen magazines, is constructed not only to entertain the reader but also to offer behavioral guidance.
The texts of these columns, titled, “Say Anything” in YM, “Trauma Rama” in Seventeen, and “Why Me?” in Teen, consist of a collection of embarrassing incidents in the magazine readers’ lives.
Clearly, teenaged girls caught “out of control” (making out with a partner, showing off to attract attention, applying makeup with a heavy or an uneducated hand) risk embarrassment and social alienation.
The teenage reader, made aware of the risks of certain behaviors in certain scenarios can, by studying these columns, develops a certain understanding of societal rules.