Our interest in publishing began at 18, when Tali won a contest to design a Reader Produced Issue of the beloved Sassy magazine. Sassy was as cool and real as any girls' magazine could get. They flew Tali and a bunch of teens to New York City for 3 weeks to design, write and edit the issue. Thus sparked our love of both New York and self-publishing!

We published HUES Magazine from 1992-97

The Story of HUES: A Magazine and a Movement

Before we became The AstroTwins, we founded the multicultural women's mag HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters) in 1992, and published it for seven years. We started HUES as a class project at the University of Michigan when we were 19 years old. With the help our friend Dyann Logwood, and many cool people from our community, we expanded it into a full-color national glossy.

The idea happened when Tali, Dyann, and I were trapped in a snowy dorm cut off from our school's main campus. We anointed ourselves "vending maching philosophers," because we spent most evenings munching on packaged snack foods and talking about life until the wee hours. One of our favorite topics was the ways that the media—particularly women's magazines—made us feel unattractive, worthless, and invisible. We'd all felt excluded from magazines both culturally (Dyann is African American, and Tali and I are Israeli-American) and physically (like most women, none of us were supermodels).

We decided to create our idea of the perfect magazine. It would speak to women of all cultures and sizes. It would redefine beauty and strength, making it cool for women to be powerful and self-aware. We would invite women to write about their own experiences and identities, from a first-person perspective.

The first issue of HUES was a tiny, TV Guide-sized local zine, which we distributed on campus. Grants from a few student organizations allowed us to print 1,000 copies. We produced 3 more local issues, then decided to go national when Tali and I graduated in 1994.

For the next 3 years, we set up shop in our apartments. We worked with volunteer writers and editors, and cranked out 9 national issues with a 25,000-count circulation to newsstands and subscribers. Feminist leaders Gloria Steinem and Rebecca Walker joined our advisory board, and the magazine was adopted as course curriculum by many universities around the country. We published HUES twice a year, and were never entirely sure where we'd find the money to print our next edition. But each time, we managed to scrape together just enough. As for our own bills, we all juggled a few part-time and evening jobs to cover those.

In 1997, we decided to seek outside funding and hooked up with New Moon Publishing in Duluth, Minnesota. New Moon acquired HUES that October, published it until 1999.

HUES is but a memory today, although I still have yet to see a glossy, colorful magazine that represents such diverse young women in both image, attitude and voice. I often joke that I earned my Ph.D—a "publishing HUES degree" —from the experience.

Ophi created Body Outlaws, a collection of multicultural body image stories

Body image is a huge cause of ours, so Ophi put together the multicultural collection Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty & Body Image (Seal Press, 1997). We wanted women and men to have real-life recipes of the journey, struggles and triumphs involved in loving oneself "through thick and thin." Now in its third edition, Body Outlaws has been translated into Greek and Chinese, adapted as a stageplay and is used as curriculum in schools around the country.

Learn more about the book at www.bodyoutlaws.com!

When she's not reading the stars, Ophi travels the country talking to girls and women about the media and healthy body image.

We have a body image site at www.loveyourbody.org. One of the highlights is our 'Feed the Model' video game, which you can also play here at AstroStyle!