Brought up with fashion magazines that urge zealous dieting and spending hundreds on cosmetics and clothes, it is so refreshing to witness the start of a magazine that showcases alternative perceptions of beauty. The editors and art director of new publication, Ladybeard, are passionate and challenging but not aggressive, ‘to the point’ but understanding, stylish, intelligent and not afraid to flash a bit of armpit hair. They certainly have the potential to take this magazine far. This is what they had to say:

So, what is Ladybeard? Short answer: feminist glossy.

The magazine, the editors say, aims to challenge the idea that “to be beautiful you have to subscribe to a certain white, heterosexual, airbrushed idea” and “where representations of sex and men seem to be a little bit removed from the kind of equality that we strive towards and make women feel bad about themselves.”

“We want to create something that is beautiful and has those pictures you want to tear out, but won’t damage you at the end of the day,” they add.

Ladybeard is an alternative to the popular glossy magazine: “It’s something I would have liked to pick up when I was 14 which would have been equally as beautiful as something like Vogue, but wouldn’t have given me such a narrow, horrible and damaging perception of beauty and incredibly low self-esteem”.

The editors cite Charlotte Raven’s comments on the tendency in women’s magazines to use feminism as an alibi, arguing that within women’s media a baseline of equality is assumed and issues are discussed as though we all share the same feminist ideals.

Yet a discussion like this will be bizarrely placed next to a photo of woman “who has been airbrushed to within an inch of her life telling you to buy something so you can look like her”.Salient topics are tackled but without the acknowledgement that they are being presented “within a framework that doesn’t celebrate women at all, it doesn’t celebrate anyone”.

The team hope that the Ladybeard reader will come away with lots of different, thought-provoking ideas from a collection of voices, as opposed to feeling oppressed by an editorial team that seek to create a particular voice which projects a preconceived notion of what it means to be female.

Though they admit that at the moment the magazine doesn’t represent as diverse a collection of voices as they would like, the team want to eradicate the idea that feminism is reserved for white, middle class women.They want to get rid of the frightening prerequisite that “you can only be a feminist if you’ve never shaved your bush”.

The response so far has been extremely positive, they say, with the editors making appearances in the Observer Weekend and on BBC Woman’s Hour. The magazine’s Kickstarter campaign raised over £4,000.

Ladybeard is currently print-only: the team suggest that online articles which bombard you with comments and links to other articles can be intimidating. Print, they say, enables you to sit and think about something in isolation.

The first issue – “The Body Issue” – is filled with illustrations and artistic photographs that are able to represent the body in unusual ways, and not just as a sexual object. The team want a beautiful, covetable and collectable medium for the magazine is to entice readers who perhaps had not thought about feminism before.

The magazine, the editors tell me, aims to enable its readers to think about feminism as natural and nuanced – rather than “shouty” and aggressive.The Ladybeard reader is asked to make up his or her own mind, and to read articles that do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial team. The magazine seeks to pose feminism as a question, an open invitation for discussion.

Drake remarks that women telling other women what to do is almost as bad as men telling women what to do: “It’s exhausting. And boring.”

The Ladybeard launch party is at Jesus Forum on Sunday October 20th at 8pm.