5. Lena Soderberg, November 1972 – 7,161,561 copies sold
When people opened adult magazines from the 1970s, all of the models had so much hair their bodies looked like one giant sideburn. The November 1972 edition of Playboy wasn’t much different. So what made it so successful? Like anything extremely popular, it’s all about timing.
For the three people in the world who love image processing, they claim that one image, the “Lena” photo, is the reason copies flew off the shelves. There’s some dry and hard to understand jargon about detail, shading, and texture which made the photo so popular among virgins and image processors alike (often, the two are the same). The real reason is that this was the closest those nerds would ever get to a woman who could melt steel with her looks. The strangest part? The photo had no nudity at all.
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