Later this morning, Audrey Brashich will take the lectern at St. John's University and speak before hundreds of parents gathered for Mind on the Media's "Turn Beauty Inside Out" conference, an annual series of lectures and workshops that help raise awareness about the ways media shapes our images of femininity—and teenage girls' self-images. The topic holds special resonance for Brashich; a former teen model herself, she would later begin a career in magazine publishing by interning at the late, lamented Sassy, an experience that taught her a lot about how other media outlets targetted teenagers. She's written a book aimed at that audience, All Made Up: A Girl's Guide to Seeing Through Celebrity Hype and Celebrating Real Beauty, that seeks to empower girls into becoming self-aware consumers rather than passively accepting somebody else's standards about what's attractive or impressive. When she was putting the book together, Brashich explained last week as she arrived in New York to tape a segment for the Today show, several agents suggested to her that she aim the book at twentysomething women, telling her it would be a perfect fit on women's studies shelves. But Brashich didn't want to create a gripe session for young women who'd already been through the media wringer, and stayed true to her vision of giving young women the tools she wishes she'd had at that age—and, as she recalled from seeing letters pouring in to the various teen mags where she worked from girls who dream of becoming supermodels, which are still sorely needed.

Because Cover Girl's YA marketing deal was fresh in the news when we met, it became part of our conversation. "That's just bad, bad news," she sighed, pointing out that it was only the most blatant example of the "disheartening" amount of gratuitous product placement that's taking place in fiction aimed at teenagers and young women. Most of them aren't even bought the way Cover Girl arranged with Running Press, but are wedged into the stories as a lazy attempt at mirroring the "real world" of contemporary young women—which is itself, of course, a heavily mediated experience. Another major offender along those lines, she proposed, was Kaavya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta..., which, if it hadn't been pulled from bookshelves, could be seen to be filled with product references that were "quite glaring, considering that it was supposed to be a book aimed at young readers."