THE VANILLA CODE

When I started working at Vanilla - 23 November 2007 to be exact - I realised that there is a particular DNA to the Vanilla woman and all she believes in -- body, mind and spirit. 

One of the most fun parts of putting each month's Vanilla together was talking about the women we were going to feature. 

Pam and I came up with a code that would help us to sort of talk about people and personalities without offending anyone (external) listening:

VV = Very Vanilla. This would apply to all our cover girls - they each embody a sense of love, integrity, selflessness that was the antithesis of the "me myself and I" spirit that women are commonly encouraged to have ("you better look out for yourself", "Marry someone who loves you more than you love him", "Of course you should divorce your husband - the other guy is a much better catch and after all, your husband is boring.") I loved that we never failed to find our VV girls -- who were never about themselves, but others.

QV = Quite Vanilla. A woman who embodies some of the key qualities of a Vanilla woman but needed more "checking out" before we could decide if we should feature her :)

NVV = Not Very Vanilla. Some women who wanted to be featured in Vanilla but lacked essential qualities. However, sometimes these women had some redeeming qualities and so we put them in our KIV basket for future consideration.

VNV = Very Not Vanilla. This is the extreme - the "devil who wears Prada" as it were. This is the woman who could not care less if orphans ate rats tails for breakfast as long as her new bikini does not make her look fat. Fortunately we did not come across many -- though there were a few who outright asked us if we wanted to put them on the cover and we politely said no.

I know it sounds a bit NVV to even have a code but I guess we just had to make decisions. Though Pam did tell me sometimes that people deserve a second chance... Well, I guess given Vanilla's short shelf-life we never had that luxury, but it would have been interesting if we could have talked about women who totally turned over a new leaf... now that would have been a great Vanilla feature...