About OHLALÁ!

OHLALÁ!

Overview

OHLALÁ! is a Spanish-language monthly women's lifestyle magazine published in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Grupo La Nación. Launched in April 2008, it was created for women around the age of thirty and built around a deliberately broad idea of what a women's magazine could cover: fashion and beauty, yes, but also relationships, work, money, travel, home, health and emotional wellbeing. Its name, an expression of surprise and delight borrowed from French, set a playful tone that the magazine has kept through its print editions and its large digital community at somosohlala.com.

From the start, OHLALÁ! presented its reader not as a model to imitate but as a, in its own framing, real woman: someone with varied interests, conflicts, doubts, emotions and abilities, who might want to lead at work, manage her own economy, question whether she wants children, or rethink a relationship. Academic analysis of the magazine, including research held by the University of Buenos Aires, has highlighted that contrast with older, more traditional Argentine women's magazines, which more often defined their readers through domestic roles. OHLALÁ! instead built its identity around possibility, imperfection and dialogue, speaking to readers, in the phrase its editors have used, as if speaking to a friend.

Founding and launch

The first public edition of OHLALÁ! appeared in April 2008. The magazine's own retrospective account of reaching 100 editions, published in July 2016, records that before that first edition there was an edition zero: a dummy, known in Argentine publishing as a mono, assembled from trial articles and productions so the founding team could find the title's palette and voice. That unpublished dummy never reached readers, but the team described it as the gestation of the number that was, as they put it, born in April 2008.

The launch came from inside Grupo La Nación, the publishing group behind the historic Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación, founded in 1870. La Nación's magazine portfolio gave the new title an established home alongside other La Nación magazines and supplements. Rather than importing a foreign women's title under licence, OHLALÁ! was developed as a local brand for Argentine readers, in Argentine Spanish, with local cover subjects, local prices and local preoccupations, while ranging freely over international fashion, culture and travel.

Longevity became part of the story early. The magazine marked 100 editions in July 2016, a little over eight years after launch, and marked its seventeenth anniversary in 2025, when its director described herself as the custodian of seventeen years of the magazine's memory. Surviving in monthly print while building a daily digital operation is the central fact of its history, in an Argentine magazine market where many titles have closed or gone digital-only.

Publisher and Buenos Aires base

OHLALÁ! is published by Sociedad Anónima La Nación, the La Nación publishing company, part of Grupo La Nación. Legal notices published by the magazine for reader competitions identify the organiser as Sociedad Anónima La Nación, domiciled at Zepita 3251 in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and describe OHLALÁ! as the magazine of the newspaper La Nación, owned by that company. Buenos Aires is therefore not only the magazine's subject matter but its editorial home.

That base shapes the content. The magazine's fashion, food, decoration and travel coverage is rooted in the life of the capital and its readers: Buenos Aires neighbourhoods, Argentine designers and retailers, local restaurants and getaways, and the working and family routines of women in the city and across the country. At the same time, its distribution in its early years reached beyond the capital, and beyond Argentina, as set out below, giving a porteño magazine a regional readership.

Audience and the idea of the reader

The clearest published profile of the early OHLALÁ! reader comes from La Nación's own magazine platform data, reproduced in University of Buenos Aires research. It described the reader profile as an average age of thirty, one hundred per cent women, and a socioeconomic profile in the ABC1 and C2 bands, the upper and upper-middle segments used in Argentine audience measurement. That profile matches the seed positioning of the title: a magazine for readers around thirty, old enough to be making decisions about careers, money, relationships and homes, and addressed as decision-makers in all of them.

The editorial treatment followed from that positioning. Research on the magazine cites early features on leading at work, managing personal finances, relationships on the reader's own terms, choosing not to have children, and handling guilt and other emotions. The point was not to abandon fashion and beauty, which remained core sections, but to place them alongside work, economics and emotional life in the same issue and the same voice. The magazine's own anniversary writing returned repeatedly to community, friendship and dialogue: readers were described as part of a single community with the editorial team, and new writers were told to write as if telling a story to a friend.

Content and sections

In its classic print organisation, documented in the same La Nación platform material, OHLALÁ! was divided into sections covering the month in current affairs, quality of life, sex and relationships, fashion, beauty and health, home, and travel. Around those standing sections sat looser features including humour, first-person confessional material under the idea of what you tell no one else, a green or sustainable living strand, and economics. A typical issue therefore moved from a cover interview through fashion and beauty productions to relationship advice, health reporting, home ideas and travel stories.

The digital edition organises a recognisably similar mix for daily reading. The somosohlala.com homepage is structured around latest news, lifestyle, horoscopes, fashion, beauty, entertainment, decoration and opinion, with health, relationships and motherhood prominent inside the lifestyle coverage. Cover stories remain central: the site highlights a nota de tapa, a cover interview, such as conversations with Argentine entertainment figures about separation, motherhood and returning to work. Entertainment news, celebrity looks, film and television coverage sit beside practical service journalism on hair, skin, nails, home organisation and family life.

Two long-running strands illustrate the range. The horoscope, with daily, weekly and sign-by-sign forecasts, is one of the site's most visible services, reflecting how central astrology content has become to Argentine women's digital reading. At the other end of the register, opinion and first-person essays tackle self-demand, motherhood, digital safety and education, inviting readers to see the magazine as a space for argument as well as advice.

Print format and early circulation

The La Nación platform data reproduced in academic research gives a detailed snapshot of the print magazine in the period around 2011 to 2013. OHLALÁ! was monthly, measured 22.8 by 27.5 centimetres, averaged around 250 pages, and used a 200-gram matte cover. Those figures describe a thick, large-format glossy monthly of the kind that anchored newsstand and subscription sales for women's magazines in that period.

The same snapshot recorded net sales of 79,083 copies and 38,437 subscribers, sourced to audience research covering May 2011 to April 2012, and distribution in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. Those are historical figures for that period, not a claim about present-day circulation, and they should be read that way. What they establish is scale at the title's early height: a paid monthly selling in the tens of thousands, with roughly half that sale accounted for by subscribers, and a footprint extending to Argentina's two nearest neighbours. The magazine's own 2016 anniversary account described the result, in its words, as having positioned itself as a leader in the women's magazine market, a claim made by the title about itself and best understood as a reflection of that early commercial strength.

Editors and contributors

The best-documented editorial figure is Soledad Simond. The magazine records that she was part of the team that created the OHLALÁ! brand at La Nación and then directed the magazine; its 2016 anniversary material noted that she had by then directed it for six years, alongside work facilitating empowerment workshops and giving workshops on public speaking and entrepreneurial planning. She was still writing as director for the seventeenth anniversary in 2025, describing herself as the team's most veteran member and the guardian of its memory, and her editorials on balancing spiritual and everyday life, risk and the future are a recurring voice on the site.

Another long-standing byline is Inés Dates, identified by the magazine as its psychologist. Dates contributed to the 100th edition reflection, writing about numbers, achievement and self-expectation, and her presence illustrates a house style in which expert contributors, especially in psychology and wellbeing, write as continuing members of the community rather than one-off commentators. The current site bylines include editors and writers across fashion, entertainment, lifestyle and books, including, in recent coverage, editor Nathalie Jarast writing on literature and authors.

Digital presence and community

The magazine's digital home is somosohlala.com, a name that itself translates as we are OHLALÁ! and underlines the community positioning. The site publishes daily across news, fashion, beauty, entertainment, decoration, lifestyle and horoscopes, extending a monthly print brand into an always-on service. Its self-description offers readers the latest in entertainment and fashion together with a guide to improving quality of life, a concise summary of the print promise translated for the web.

Reader participation is built into the model. A standing invitation, Contanos tu historia, tell us your story, asks readers to submit true first-person stories for possible publication, on themes ranging from love stories and mental health to fertility journeys, identity, dating, family relationships, alternative therapies, expatriate life and successful or failed-then-successful businesses. Submissions are capped at 5,000 characters, and the magazine warns that months may pass before a story is followed up, a small detail that conveys the volume of the community response the feature expects. Competitions and social campaigns, such as the MuyOhlala Instagram campaign documented in 2016 legal bases published by Sociedad Anónima La Nación, have similarly used social media to grow and activate the readership.

Current status

OHLALÁ! remains active as both a magazine brand and a digital publication of Grupo La Nación, with somosohlala.com publishing new material daily at the time of writing, including current entertainment, fashion, beauty, health and horoscope coverage, and with its print identity and cover story tradition still foregrounded on the site. Few Argentine women's monthlies launched in the 2000s have maintained that combined presence for more than seventeen years.

Its significance is the model it established locally: a domestically created women's magazine that treated work, money, relationships and emotional life as seriously as fashion and beauty, addressed a reader around thirty as an imperfect, changing person rather than an ideal, and then carried that voice from a thick monthly glossy into a daily digital community without changing its name, its publisher or its basic promise.