It was well worth DiamondSea scanning some of the contents, because even if you don't like the cover, the contents are as decent as ever, livened up by that page design that makes everything seem exciting.
The two versions of the cover (the other by Marc Quinn) both involve diamante, but only virtually, as neither the instore issues I've seen or my subscription copy had real diamante on it, which I would have happily picked off and applied elsewhere. Maybe it's a repeat of a previous instance, where only people in London got the real thing.
The article I liked the most is at the back - how children react to their parents having plastic surgery, messages about attitudes to appearances, the effect of even something as simple as a mother regularly straightening her hair, then one day hearing her four-year-old daughter bemoan her own hair, the natural curls she inherited - the curls she never sees in her mother.
The Marc Quinn article reveals tooth-grinding levels of self-absorption, with him thinking the Kate Moss statue has a rightful position in the pantheon of art history.