Hymy

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Hymy ("Smile") is a Finnish magazine, which was launched in 1959 by publisher Urpo Lahtinen^[1] and was named after his wife Hymy Lahtinen. In the 1960s and 1970s Hymy became a success with sensationalist stories containing lots of sex and gossip about Finnish celebrities, often verging on the invasion of privacy. Typical Hymy stories would be about the singer Irwin Goodman, Finland's first openly gay celebrity Monsieur Mosse, or the notorious pictorial on Jörn Donner naked on a Gambian beach with a local underage young girl. The most famous writer for Hymy was Veikko Ennala, and probably one of the most infamous stories was about the author Timo K. Mukka, which many thought was one of the main causes of the author's early death soon afterwards. This resulted in a Finnish law called the Lex Hymy, regulating any press stories published about private persons.

In March 2008 the magazine published story of the Finnish Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva's SMS messages to a erotic dancer. After the magazine on April 1, 2008 published several of the messages, Kanerva was dismissed.