About Caras

Caras

Overview

Caras is a Spanish-language weekly celebrity and women's magazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Editorial Perfil. Its name means Faces in Spanish, a title that sums up its editorial promise: to put faces — the faces of public figures, performers, models, television personalities, members of high society and, at times, political figures — at the centre of the story. Established in Argentina on 24 November 1992, it is classified in reference listings as both a women's magazine and a celebrity magazine, and that double identity has defined it throughout its life. Fashion, beauty, health, cuisine and decoration sit alongside reporting on the private lives of well-known people, so that a single issue can move from a cover portrait and an interview to advice on how to dress, eat, decorate a home or care for one's appearance.

Caras belongs to a wider international brand of the same name. Editions followed in Brazil in 1993 and in Portugal in 1995, and a Spanish-language edition has also been published in Uruguay, with Editorial Perfil listed as publisher for Argentina and Uruguay. The Argentine edition is nevertheless the original: the brand began in Buenos Aires, and its Argentine website is caras.perfil.com, within the digital network of Editorial Perfil. Understanding Caras therefore requires looking in two directions at once — at the glossy, highly visual celebrity weekly produced in Buenos Aires, and at the larger Perfil publishing group, founded in the 1970s, whose success in magazines helped finance its later expansion into newspapers, television and digital media.

Founding in Buenos Aires

Caras was established in Argentina on 24 November 1992 by Editorial Perfil. The date matters because it places the launch in a particular moment in Argentine media history. Print magazines still commanded large newsstand sales and substantial advertising in the early 1990s, television celebrity culture was expanding, and a weekly built around photographs, short and accessible stories and recognisable faces could reach readers who might not buy a political newsmagazine or a daily newspaper every day. A weekly rhythm suited that material: public appearances, parties, premieres, holidays, romances and family milestones change constantly, and a magazine published every week could present them while they still felt current.

Buenos Aires supplied both the newsroom base and much of the social world the magazine covered. The capital is Argentina's centre for television production, theatre, fashion, publishing and national politics, and its restaurants, hotels, resorts-season society and cultural openings have long provided the settings for the photographs on which a celebrity weekly depends. Reference listings place the Argentine edition in Buenos Aires, alongside Rio de Janeiro for Brazil, Lisbon for Portugal and Montevideo for Uruguay. That geography also explains the brand's later shape: a Buenos Aires idea, in Spanish, was adapted within a year for the much larger Brazilian market in Portuguese, and then for Portugal.

Publisher and ownership

The publisher of Caras in Argentina is Editorial Perfil, a privately owned Argentine publishing house owned by the Fontevecchia family. The Media Ownership Monitor records Editorial Perfil S.A. as the owner of the newspaper Perfil and describes the group as belonging to the Fontevecchia family, with Jorge Fontevecchia as its best-known figure. Jorge Fontevecchia founded Editorial Perfil in 1976 together with his father, and the company grew from magazines into one of Argentina's most recognisable multimedia groups. A later corporate account of Perfil likewise dates the founding of Editorial Perfil to 1976 and describes it as having grown into an integrated group with print, digital and broadcast operations, as well as interests in printing and education.

Within that group, Caras has occupied the celebrity and lifestyle end of a broad magazine portfolio. The Media Ownership Monitor's profile of Jorge Fontevecchia lists the group's magazines as including Noticias, Caras, Semanario, Hombre, Look, Mía, Luz, Parabrisas, Fortuna, Weekend and others. Noticias, the weekly newsmagazine founded in 1976, gave Perfil its reputation for political journalism; Caras, launched sixteen years later, gave it a very different asset — a visually driven title whose readers and advertisers were interested in fame, success, glamour and consumption. The Monitor also notes that in 1993 Jorge Fontevecchia founded Caras in Brazil, that it was a success in a larger publishing market than Argentina's, and that income from Brazil helped him embark on larger projects, including the newspaper that became Diario Perfil. That sequence is important to the Argentine edition's history even though it happened abroad: the original Buenos Aires title proved exportable, and its Brazilian performance strengthened the parent company that continued to publish it at home.

Content, format and sections

Reference descriptions of Caras define its content in consistent terms. It provides weekly news on the private lives of public figures, from its home market and from other countries, together with news and features about fashion, beauty, health, cuisine and decoration. Those five service subjects — what to wear, how to look, how to stay well, what to cook and how to arrange a home — are what make it a women's magazine as well as a celebrity magazine. The celebrity coverage supplies the narrative and the photographs; the service coverage supplies practical reasons to keep an issue, cut out a recipe or return to a beauty or decoration feature after the news has dated.

Perfil's own advertising material described the formula in more commercial language. A Perfil media kit summarised Caras as a magazine that showed readers the lifestyle of celebrities and reflected success, fame and glamour, with strong visual appeal that created a prestigious setting for brands. Whether described editorially or commercially, the emphasis was the same: large, high-quality images, recognisable people and an aspirational tone. The cover is central to that format. A January 2022 cover featuring the singer Ricky Martin, used to illustrate reference entries on the magazine, is a typical example of the approach — a single internationally known face, immediately identifiable at a newsstand, signalling entertainment and glamour rather than hard news. The magazine's name reinforces the device: readers are promised faces first, and stories second.

Editions beyond Argentina

The Argentine launch was followed quickly by expansion. Reference listings date the Brazilian edition to 1993 and the Portuguese edition to 1995, and list Caras as published in Spanish in Argentina and Uruguay and in Portuguese in Brazil and Portugal. The magazine has also been distributed in Angola since September 2005, extending the Portuguese-language edition's reach into Africa. In Portugal the title passed through larger European publishing structures: its Lisbon publisher was Edimpresa-Editora Lda, a subsidiary of the Swiss publishing company Edipresse, it was part of the Portuguese conglomerate Impresa Group, and in 2018 the Portuguese company Trust in News acquired the magazine there. Those changes concern the Portuguese edition's ownership, not the Argentine edition's, which remained listed under Editorial Perfil.

The wider brand has also contracted as well as expanded. Reference entries record that an edition of Caras was published in Chile by Editorial Televisa and that the Chilean edition ended in 2019, a reminder that international magazine licensing depends on local advertising and newsstand markets that can change quickly. For the Argentine profile, the significance of the foreign editions is twofold. First, they show that the Buenos Aires format — celebrity lives plus fashion, beauty, health, food and home — travelled well across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking markets. Second, they mean that some figures and honours attached to the name Caras in international sources belong to a sister edition, a distinction the next sections keep carefully in view.

Audience, circulation and reach

No independently verified circulation figure for the Argentine edition of Caras is given in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. The circulation numbers most often attached to the title in reference listings — 91,000 copies in 2007, 88,691 copies from February 2008 to February 2009, and 60,979 copies between September and October 2013 — appear in the context of the Portuguese edition and its European market reporting. Attributing those numbers to Buenos Aires would be a factual error, and readers should treat them only as evidence of the scale the brand achieved in Portugal during those years, and of the general decline in print circulation that European and Latin American magazines alike experienced between 2007 and 2013.

What can be said about the Argentine audience comes from Perfil's own commercial descriptions. Its media-kit material presented Caras readers as consumers interested in celebrity lifestyles and in mass-market and high-end products and services, and presented the magazine's visual glamour as an environment that predisposed readers to buy. That is a publisher's pitch to advertisers rather than an independent audience audit, and it is reported here as such. It does, however, confirm the intended audience in the publisher's own terms: adult readers, addressed principally as women interested in famous people's lives and in the fashion, beauty and home goods that surround them, rather than readers seeking political or economic analysis — the territory of Perfil's Noticias and of the newspaper Perfil within the same group.

Covers, galas and public moments

Celebrity magazines make much of their history in public, at parties and on covers, and Caras is no exception. Its annual gala became a fixture of the Buenos Aires social calendar described in entertainment reporting. Coverage of the 2013 gala, held at Madero Walk in Puerto Madero to mark 21 years of the magazine, described a cover group chosen from the guests, including Mirtha Legrand, Susana Giménez, Carolina Pampita Ardohain, Griselda Siciliani, Natalia Oreiro, Nacha Guevara, Moria Casán, Graciela Borges, Catherine Fulop and Araceli González. Reporting on the 2024 gala, marking 32 years since the first publication, described an annual celebration at Malloy's Costanera in Buenos Aires attended by figures from entertainment, culture and politics, with a tribute to Mirtha Legrand and a joint cover photograph including Legrand, Susana Giménez, Mariana Fabbiani, Pampita Ardohain and other well-known guests, and with the Buenos Aires city government participating as an official sponsor.

Those guest lists are not incidental detail. They show how a celebrity weekly sustains itself: the people it covers lend their presence to its celebrations, the celebrations become covers and photo features, and the covers reinforce the magazine's claim to stand close to fame. A title launched in November 1992 that could still gather Argentina's longest-running television personalities for a 32nd-anniversary cover in 2024 had, by that measure, kept a central place in the country's entertainment-society circuit for more than three decades.

Criticism and a public apology

The same cover-driven formula has also drawn criticism, most prominently in July 2020. That month Caras promoted a cover about Amalia, the eldest daughter of Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, headlined in Spanish to the effect that she proudly showed off her plus-size look. The headline was widely repudiated on social media and in other media, with critics and health specialists arguing that it valued a 16-year-old for her body size, risked encouraging the bullying the accompanying story itself described, and reproduced the stereotypes the magazine said it wanted to challenge. Héctor Maugeri, then the magazine's vice-director, defended the story publicly as an account of overcoming and resilience and said Caras gave a voice to people society had tried to silence.

The magazine then apologised. In a published statement attributed to its director, Caras acknowledged that, without bad intention, it had made a mistake, accepted responsibility, and offered sincere apologies to anyone who had felt aggrieved, saying that the respect and admiration it felt for Máxima Zorreguieta and her family had not been reflected in the cover headline and that it would pursue training with an inclusive perspective. The episode was reported nationally at the time and remains the best-documented controversy in the Argentine edition's recent history. It is included here because it illustrates, in a single verified case, the tension built into celebrity publishing: a magazine whose commercial strength is judging and displaying appearances was publicly challenged, and publicly corrected itself, when readers judged that a cover had crossed a line.

Digital presence and television

Like every Argentine print weekly, Caras has had to rebuild its audience online. Its Argentine digital home is caras.perfil.com, inside Editorial Perfil's network of magazine and newspaper sites. Perfil's media-kit material already described, in the mid-2010s, a redesigned Caras website with larger, high-resolution images, simpler navigation designed with tablets in mind, and integration with social networks — an acknowledgement that a photograph-led magazine had to compete on screens, where celebrity images circulate instantly, rather than only on newsstands, where a weekly cover once held its value for seven days. The brand's social identity in that material was given as carasargentina, distinguishing the Argentine edition from its Brazilian, Portuguese and Uruguayan sisters.

The brand then moved into television. Reference listings record that on 4 March 2024 the Argentine magazine was launched as Caras TV on channel 21.1 of digital terrestrial television in Argentina. Jorge Fontevecchia later explained the logic in comments reported on Perfil's television plans: Warner's Fashion TV rights had ended, Perfil already had experience with Caras television in Portugal, and the group saw Caras TV as a channel aimed at an audience interested in luxury and in the pleasurable side of life. The launch extended the magazine's original proposition — celebrity lifestyles, fashion and glamour — from a weekly print object and a website into a broadcast brand carrying the same name.

Current status and significance

Caras remains listed as a weekly celebrity and women's magazine published by Editorial Perfil in Buenos Aires, with its digital edition at caras.perfil.com and, since March 2024, a television namesake in Caras TV. Its history can be read as three connected stories. The first is a Buenos Aires launch on 24 November 1992 that found a durable formula: famous faces on the cover, private lives inside, and fashion, beauty, health, cuisine and decoration around them. The second is an international expansion — Brazil in 1993, Portugal in 1995, publication in Uruguay and distribution in Angola — that turned an Argentine weekly into a Spanish- and Portuguese-language brand, strengthened its publisher, and at times makes care necessary to separate the Argentine edition's record from its sisters' figures and honours. The third is adaptation: from newsstand weekly to redesigned website and social presence, to a television channel, and through a public controversy in 2020 that forced the magazine to apologise for a cover and reconsider how it presents the bodies it displays.

For a directory of Argentine media, Caras is significant not because it reports politics or economics — its sister publications do that — but because it documents, week after week since 1992, who Argentina considered famous, beautiful and worth imitating, and how those judgements changed. Few Argentine magazines launched in the 1990s remain so recognisable by a single word and a single device: a face, looking out from the cover.