Scarlet Magazine

Overview

Scarlet was a British monthly women's magazine launched in November 2004 with the tagline "the new magazine for women who get it". Published first by Blaze Publishing and then by Interactive Publishing, it took an unusually frank approach to women's health, relationships and sexuality at a time when the mainstream women's market was dominated by celebrity weeklies. The print magazine ceased publication in June 2010 when its publisher went into liquidation; the title was subsequently bought by Scarlet Media Limited for relaunch as a digital-only magazine.

Launch and Positioning

Scarlet appeared in November 2004, entering a crowded women's market in which the growth titles were celebrity-led weeklies such as Closer, Heat and Now. Scarlet's proposition was different: a monthly that would talk about sex, health and relationships with the frankness its editors believed women used among themselves. Its stated aim was to empower women to lead healthier lives through features written the way women talk to each other when men are not around — a positioning that made candor itself the brand.

Distribution

The magazine was distributed across the United Kingdom through the standard magazine retail network, including W H Smith, Tesco, Superdrug and Somerfield. High-street and supermarket distribution placed Scarlet directly beside the celebrity titles and women's monthlies with which it competed for the same shopping basket — a necessity for a new independent title without a major publisher's marketing machine.

Editorial Content

Scarlet's content combined health and relationship features with fiction: its fiction section was explicitly designed to promote safe sex by eroticizing condom use, an editorial policy without real parallel in the mainstream women's market of the time. The magazine also campaigned against "fatism" in the media, arguing against the stigmatization of larger bodies in fashion and celebrity coverage. The combination of sexual frankness, health information and body-politics campaigning gave Scarlet a profile closer to a cause than a conventional glossy.

Reception

The magazine's approach won favorable attention in the national press: it received positive reviews in The Times and The Guardian, whose media coverage treated Scarlet's frankness as a refreshing departure in a market criticized for formulaic celebrity content. For an independent monthly, such notices were significant marketing assets and evidence that its editorial bet had registered with critics even in a difficult commercial category.

Change of Publisher

Scarlet began under Blaze Publishing Ltd and was later sold to Interactive Publishing, under which it continued to its end. The passage between small independent publishers reflects the economics of the mid-2000s women's market, where launch costs were high, advertising was consolidating around the celebrity weeklies and the big monthlies, and independent titles changed hands as their backers sought scale or exit.

Liquidation and Closure of the Print Edition

In June 2010 the magazine went into liquidation and ceased publication. The date placed its death in the long post-2008 contraction of British consumer magazines, in which advertising declines eliminated many mid-sized titles; the women's monthly sector was particularly exposed as readers and advertisers moved toward digital media and the surviving celebrity brands.

Digital Revival

After the liquidation, the Scarlet title was acquired by a new company, Scarlet Media Limited, which relaunched it as a digital-only magazine. The survival of the name in digital form followed a pattern familiar in British magazine publishing of the 2010s: print editions closed while their brands — with residual reader recognition and search value — continued as websites under new owners at a fraction of print's cost base.

The Women's Magazine Market It Inhabited

Scarlet's lifespan, 2004–2010, coincided with the last strong years of the traditional British women's magazine business and the beginning of its digital disruption. Against ABC figures of the period — in which the celebrity weeklies measured circulations in the hundreds of thousands and even venerable monthlies were sliding — a frank, cause-led independent monthly was always swimming upstream. That it survived five and a half years, won national-press praise and retained enough brand value to be bought out of liquidation is the measure of its distinctiveness.

Legacy

Scarlet is remembered for attempting something the mainstream women's market largely would not: treating sexual health as a feature subject rather than a problem page, and using fiction as a public-health tool. Its history records both the possibilities for independent launches in the mid-2000s market and the speed with which that market closed.

Scarlet's editorial wager deserves precise statement, because it was unusual in the trade. British women's magazines of 2004 handled sexuality through problem pages and celebrity confession; Scarlet proposed instead that health information and erotic fiction could share an issue and a purpose — its fiction section was a stated safe-sex intervention, eroticizing condom use — and that body politics belonged in a commercial monthly, as its campaign against "fatism" in the media asserted. The national press noticed the difference: positive reviews in The Times and The Guardian gave an independent title, launched by Blaze Publishing in November 2004 under the line "the new magazine for women who get it", a critical standing out of proportion to its resources. Its distribution through W H Smith, Tesco, Superdrug and Somerfield placed it in the mainstream it was trying to change. The later record — sale to Interactive Publishing, liquidation and closure in June 2010 amid the post-2008 magazine contraction, and the title's purchase by Scarlet Media Limited for digital-only revival — follows the standard arc of the independent launches of its decade; what remains distinctly Scarlet's is the editorial proposition itself, which the market's subsequent digital generation of women's media would adopt as a matter of course.

The market data of Scarlet's years explain its struggle without diminishing its distinctiveness. The women's sector it entered was bifurcating: celebrity weeklies with circulations in the hundreds of thousands at one pole, venerable monthlies in managed decline at the other, and advertising following scale. A monthly built on frankness rather than celebrity had no natural advertiser base of comparable size, and its passage from Blaze Publishing to Interactive Publishing traces the search for one. Its positive notices in The Times and The Guardian show the critical establishment understood the proposition; the June 2010 liquidation shows the arithmetic that governed regardless. The digital-only afterlife under Scarlet Media Limited preserved the one asset that survived the arithmetic — the name and what it stood for.

The title's tagline — "the new magazine for women who get it" — condensed its wager into a compliment: the reader was assumed to be ahead of the market's opinion of her, fluent in the subjects other magazines euphemized. Five and a half years of publication suggest the compliment found its audience; the liquidation of 2010 says the audience, in the post-crash advertising market, was not enough. Both facts belong to the record of British women's publishing in its last print decade.

Its fiction-as-health-policy device remains the magazine's most cited editorial idea: using erotic short stories to normalize condom use was, in 2004, a public-health intervention disguised as entertainment, executed by a commercial women's monthly with supermarket distribution — a combination no health authority could have bought at any price.

Directory Facts

Scarlet Magazine was a monthly women's magazine published in London, England, United Kingdom, by Blaze Publishing and later Interactive Publishing, from November 2004 to June 2010; it was later relaunched in digital-only form by Scarlet Media Limited. The print magazine is defunct.