The Top Selling Celebrity Faces

Forbes jut put out their first-ever analysis of the top-selling celebrity faces - and guess who's at number one? No, it's not Angelina Jolie and it's not Britney Spears - on the contrary. It looks like what sells is not overrated drama and overrated celebrities, but a welcome dash of normality set in the madness of the everyday celebrity news - or so it would seem.

The fact is the rules of the game are changing. "Brand loyalty isn't what it used to be in terms of celebrity magazines", explains Candace Trunzo, editor in chief of Star magazine. "Each week, people decide on what they are or aren't going to buy based on the cover, and if you don't draw them in with it, you lose that undecided portion of your audience". And this is why it seems that having your own face smile or glare at you from the cover of a magazine it getting to be a pretty big thing.

Take a look at the Top Ten - and make up your own mind as to whether there's any relevance in this analysis, in other words, some reason behind the madness I was mentioning earlier, or whether it's just random bit, flames and sparks depending on who's in the mood for doing crazy things every other day.

1) Jennifer Aniston
2) Brad Pitt
3) Scarlett Johansson
4) Angelina Jolie
5) Reese Witherspoon
6) Katie Holmes
7) Carrie Underwood
8) Jennifer Hudson
9) Valerie Bertinelli
10) Kelly Ripa

And of course, the question that pops into my mind is - how did they do it? How did they end up with this particular line-up? Well, this is what the Forbes people have to say - and we'd better believe them, as they're the Top 10 experts in all things under the Sun.

"We looked at the newsstand sales of the six leading celebrity weeklies-- People, Star, US Weekly, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and OK!--over a six-month period ending June 30th", they state. "We eliminated all non-celebrity and collage covers (damn, there goes Avril Lavigne out the window) as well as special issues with exceptionally large rate bases. Then we counted how many more--or less--issues the celebrity's cover sold, as compared with the magazine's average newsstand sales. Next, we factored in the number of full covers a celebrity graced. Finally, we ranked his or her consumer appeal".

Sounds pretty complicated to me - but there are some funny things about this whole "who sells most" frenzy. Aniston, it seems, earned the top spot because she gathered a "high appeal" score of 36. She appeared on the cover of every one of the six big sellers, except In Touch, at least once during the charted interval, and it turns out that her face collectively sold over 5 million copies. The biggest disappointment at the newsstand? Another (not so funny but unfortunately true) fact is that Britney Spears hit bottom in this respect as well, with a low appeal score of 3. The only one who scored worse was Paris Hilton, who got a 2. Anyone else finds that hilarious?