Fame x Beauty + Scandal: How to Calculate a Celeb Baby's Value

News that the loooooong-awaited birth in France of the "Brangelina" twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, has kicked off a bidding war among magazines is predictable enough. News that bidding has reached $11m, though, raises a question: just how much is a celeb's kid now worth? Once A-list children made their debut at the Crillon ball in Paris; now they're on the cover of a Richard Desmond publication - OK!, generally, not Asian Babes.

The debut photos of Brad and Angelina's first baby were worth a mere $4.1m, which will surely lead to terrible sibling insecurity in future years. But multiple births clearly have more cachet: Jennifer Lopez reportedly received $5m for her twins. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes were paid nothing for the debut photos of their daughter Suri in Vanity Fair, but they may have been looking to get something else out of them. Such as an end to rumors about the child's non-existence.

Some might think these prices are the product of a celebrity-obsessed media that believes its own self-produced hype. In fact, they are the result of a strict mathematical formula: Value of pictures = Fame of parents x glamorousness of mother during pregnancy x general attractiveness of both parents (no one wants to fork out a couple of mil for an ugly baby) + any past scandal that either parent has overcome to reach this ending + funniness of child's name. Divide amount by two-thirds if child is adopted: the interest in celebrity kids is to see how the celebrity's genes have fared, you see.

But A-list genes can get a bit bland, so children of those on the periphery of celebrity can also be valuable commodities. Jordan got £200,000 for each of her children, while Jamie Lynn Spears, the semi-famous-by-proxy teenage sister of Britney Spears, received £1m for her daughter. No one is sure how much Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson received for photos of their daughter (figures between £100,000 and £250,000 have been sited), the uncertainty perhaps reflecting the media's nervousness about the public's fluctuating feelings towards the parents. By contrast, Wayne and Coleen are guaranteed several million when their (and our) happy day arrives.

But beware pirates! When Nicole Richie's daughter was born, she made a deal with InStyle. Unfortunately, someone hawked some unauthorized photos around town for $3,000, thus potentially reducing in value the ones for InStyle. That Richie's occasional nemesis Paris Hilton was allegedly in every photo raised suspicions, though Hilton's publicist denied any connection. Rumors that a camera-toting Jennifer Aniston has been spotted in the bushes outside a certain French hospital remain, at time of going to press, unconfirmed.