And I can report that The Gloss does, perhaps, use longer words . . .

though fewer per page . . . than most publications that cost as much as it does. But on the whole, the magazine aims for the response all fashion/lifestyle magazines aim for. Imaginative empathy is encouraged to shade into desire, followed by calculations as to which of the desirable things on offer the reader wants to and can afford to buy, the better to somehow resemble the people the magazine features, and to better imagine sharing their way of life.

Magazines want readers to buy things.

Fair enough; most readers want to buy things, and enjoy buying or wanting to buy things. And the kind of attention a woman gives to something she might buy . . . that haircut, those shoes, the ring on the model's finger . . . where the brain scans a vast database of experience of shoes and hairstyles and rings, though not thought in the philosopher's sense of the word, is a form of mental activity. It is impossible to look at a photo of Posh Becks's new bob without the keenest concentration. Was it a good idea? Should I rush out to the hairdresser?

Not that Mrs Beckham and her like are going to grace the pages of The Gloss. She is a lower-middle class idol, essentially English, whereas The Gloss seems to be in the business of defining a new subset of the middling Irish bourgeoisie. I was amazed at the number of daughters contributing to the magazine. Along with the usual stalwart freelancers' contributions, there is material here from a daughter of a father and mother I know slightly about a daughter whose mother and father I'm acquainted with; from a daughter I don't know though I know her dynamic mother, and from the son of a couple where I knew the father best when they were a couple. Oh and I knew, slightly, the mother of a featured family. Many of these parents began their lives armed with very little but talent, but over time became financially comfortable. Their children could, if they so chose, do nothing at all. But they're working for a magazine. The magazine's ideal person, in fact, seems to be a wellbrought-up young Irish person from a cultured home who works at something trendy . . . art galleries, design, personal chef, that kind of thing.

But the backgrounds of the writers doesn't root The Gloss in Ireland. Nor does it have real Irish women in it, spilling out of their pretty frocks as they do things like go to the races and attend the launches of beauty products and throw charity lunches. Nor is it anchored by women's traditional interests. I don't believe there's a baby in the whole issue. Whereas in magazines such as OK! the tanned, blonde stars often carry babies.

They are often pregnant. Their tanned men carry babies. Indeed, the making of babies is not a topic of interest to The Gloss.

Cosmopolitan, for instance, when it offers a reader '63 Ways to Blow his Mind' doesn't mean 'mind' in the strict sense of the term.

Even an Image I turned up had a piece on 'Quick Sex' along with the gentilities of the Turf Club and Anne Madden (in an article by Mebh Ruane which actually does involve thinking). But The Gloss is as free from animal vitality as the airbrushed pages of, say, VIP . . . although the VIP I consulted offered us the pleasure of contemplating, as Michael Flatley must have often have done, the lovely body of Flatley's ex-fiancee, and hearing from her that if she had her time over she would not have had her breasts done. (Why? ) The Gloss belongs not to Ireland . . .

daughters notwithstanding . . . but to the international universe of money. A striking thing about the magazine is that though the clothes are priced (a cream leather trench coat, for example, in which most of us would look like the back seat of a sports car, costs 2,975), the actual cost of the other dangled treats is, apparently, beneath our attention.

The cost of the meal in the Four Seasons, of the furnishings in the clutter-child-and-petfree featured house, of a night in a suite in the Cipriani, or of flying in a private jet to Argentina or the south of France to mix with other Irish people, is not addressed. Of course, maybe this is, now, an Irish thing.

Maybe there are lots of youngish, Irish people with arty backgrounds who have not just money but pots of it. Or maybe there are old people with pots of money who think if they spend a lot of money they'll be young and arty. Students of native class distinctions won't know what precise dream The Gloss is peddling until the magazine settles down.

For the moment, anyway, all it says about Ireland is that there's an awful lot of luxury advertising out there, and it's searching for someone to impress.