Been thinking and doing a lot of research over the past month and came to believe that while my photo is from an English-language magazine, it's not in the US or UK (have to rely on the work done and believe it wasn't simply missed).
So, I thought again and confirmed to myself...could it be in Canada? No. New Zealand? No. Australia? I'm leaning no but have reached out to the National Library of Australia.
What I didn't realize all along is that there are other countries in the mix...Elle India, Elle Singapore and Elle South Africa all existed in 1999 and are in English. Which brings me to the following...
In early 2020, I came across the below cover of Elle UK May 1999 (it seemed familiar to me and I thought my photo might be there but it turned out not to be the case
Last week, I was looking at
https://coversarchive.wixsite.com/gallery and I found that very same cover was used for issues of Elle in other countries. I just looked again and the countries were Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan (Jul) and Japan (Aug). The problem is these are basically non-English publications so I'm having a hard time thinking my photo is there.
But.
Which other country has only a few issues showing in this archive for 1999 and fits fairly well with this group of countries?
Singapore. Among others, I don't see the covers for April through July. I have a feeling that Singapore used this cover (I am going to guess July because of the other countries even though I would have thought April or May would have been a lot more likely). This was probably the one and only time I ever picked up a magazine from Singapore but I can visualize it in my mind so we will see.
Going out on a limb but think I'm about to find my photo after a solid 19 months worth of searching. If so, I will want to get a very nice color scan of it and perhaps some of the other photos in that editorial and maybe even the Table of Contents (I've always felt - and have used - the Table of Contents in searching for this photo and am curious as to whether my thinking was correct on that after all).
The National Library of Singapore will be looking into this on July 26 when the librarian I reached out to is back from vacation. There is another library in Australia that appears to have it as well but that's it.
I had always planned on buying the magazine on e-Bay or somewhere but I doubt it's going to be possible to even find this anywhere in the world...ever.