Welcome again to Full Coverage.
This week, I’m in London, planning, strategising and dreaming with the remainder of the BoF management group on what’s to return in 2026 — we’re pondering huge!
As such, this week Full Coverage is as an alternative a group effort. I actually can’t say sufficient about my group: Brennan Kilbane, Daniela Morosini, Liz Flora and Rachael Griffiths. Not solely have been they the most effective writers and reporters at their earlier publications and through their freelance lives, however their ambition, spirit and encouragement are very largely the explanation The Business of Beauty has grown a lot in the previous few years. I truly celebrated three years at BoF final Friday — and I’m so happy with what we now have constructed collectively.
Read on to see what they’ve acquired; it’s good. I’ll be again subsequent week simply in time for a banger of a pre-Christmas learn. See you then.
Priya Rao
In this text:
- Estée Lauder seems to be at firing up its incubation machine
- A Real Housewives and Sephora crossover episode
- What does reward information truly appear like?
- L’Oréal’s guess on doctor-dispensed magnificence
A New and Improved Estée Lauder (Again)
The Estée Lauder beat is stuffed with ups and downs. The previous couple of years have yielded extra of the latter — job cuts, tepid gross sales development and rumours of name divestments. But the corporate’s energetic turnaround interval also can produce information that sounds out as extra than simply enterprise as normal for purpose.
The newest instance? At a Reuters convention in New York final week, chief govt Stéphane de La Faverie instructed the group that he sees each growing and shopping for new manufacturers as key elements of its development technique.
Generally talking, magnificence conglomerates like to purchase manufacturers quite than incubate them. While the massive paychecks many scorching labels anticipate can damage the acquirer’s backside line, buying manufacturers outright permits a holding firm to instantly add to its high line with prepared gross sales. Big conglomerates can be slower-moving, which means they do higher at operational growth into new markets or retailers, or streamlining provide chains than constructing a model from zero.
Estée Lauder Companies is aware of this higher than most — its most up-to-date brand-building train, 2016’s The Estée Edit, was meant as a Millennial-coded reboot of its core line. But not even having Kendall Jenner as its face helped it stick, lasting simply eighteen months earlier than it was wound down in 2017. (For what it’s price, I liked lots of its merchandise, particularly the lipstick in You’re Welcome, a minx-y crimson. One of the road’s builders, Sarah Creal, now has her personal lauded model with a extra upscale really feel.)
The firm has about $2 billion in money, so acquisitions are actually doable: They would simply should be calculated with excessive warning. Previous purchases have yielded blended outcomes: its buyout of Deciem, The Ordinary’s guardian firm, was an unprecedented win and helped it broaden its attain with younger buyers. Deciem can be spitting out extra sub-brands, like Niod and Avestan, per de La Faverie’s incubation thesis. But the cosmetics manufacturers it purchased within the mid-aughts like Too Faced and Becca have had struggles — Becca was wound down in 2021, whereas the corporate recorded a $50 million impairment towards Too Faced within the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal 12 months.
If ELC needs to get again within the incubation kitchen, my options can be a extra inexpensive perfume line and a extra trendy hair care model. They personal Dr Jart+, however they need to additionally get extra pores and skin within the Okay-beauty recreation one way or the other — however then once more, everybody ought to.
Daniela Morosini, Senior Correspondent and Special Projects Editor
A Wild Rose at Sephora
Let me pluck a flower from the bouquet of plotlines on the present season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and inform you in regards to the gradual dying of Wild Rose Beauty, the skincare line based by solid member, former Mormon and present non secular wayfarer Whitney Rose.
In final week’s episode, Rose shared a tearful trade together with her husband on the again porch of their trendy farmhouse, throughout which she pins Wild Rose Beauty’s failure on her husband’s encouragement to construction it as a multilevel advertising and marketing scheme, as an alternative of approaching retailers as Rose meant. Wild Rose Beauty then merged with Sol People, an organization owned by her husband Justin, that supplied all kinds of merchandise, together with dietary supplements and a “brain fitness” headset, primarily by way of direct promoting.
“The week that I met the buyer of Sephora to get Wild Rose Beauty into big box stores… You all flashed numbers in front of me. I just feel like I had no other choice,” Rose mentioned, sporting a mesh bodysuit and denims. She mentioned she is now “fighting tooth and nail” to get out of the deal and rescue her model title.
I’ve been following the plight of Wild Rose Beauty with hawk-like consideration ever since Rose’s season three revelation that she had sunk her household’s complete financial savings into the enterprise. But I used to be shocked that Rose had met with Sephora — or that Sephora had met with Rose.
To these unfamiliar with the Bravo franchise, permit me to fill you in. Despite proudly figuring out as capital-H Housewives, most solid members on the Bravo franchise try and parlay their actuality TV fame into off-screen entrepreneurship success, an ambition fuelled partly by Bethenny Frankel’s $120 million sale of her beverage label Skinnygirl to Beam Global in 2011. Since then, the ladies have spawned innumerable shopper ventures — for attire, toaster ovens, three-wick candles, intercourse toys, weed gummies and lots, after all, in magnificence, one of many few commodities these solid members have in spades.
It ought to be famous that no Housewife-founded magnificence model has a lot business success, a lot much less inked a significant retail deal. Not Ramona Singer’s Ageless by Ramona, not Gizelle Bryant’s EveryHue Beauty, not even Heather and Terry Dubrow’s Consult Beaute or Frankel’s follow-up Skinnygirl Beauty (!). Perhaps the closest was, of all individuals, Kristin Taekman, the RHONY two-season-wonder who launched a line of nail polishes with Ricky’s NYC earlier than the retailer’s shutdown in 2018.
How shut did Rose get? Sephora declined to remark, so my greatest guess shouldn’t be very far.
Brennan Kilbane, News and Features Editor
12 Days of Gift Guide Fatigue
Every 12 months, it feels as if reward information frenzy has hit a peak — just for it to push even additional the next vacation season.
That’s proved to be the case in 2025 as reward options are shoved at buyers from all angles, from manufacturers like Charlotte Tilbury who construct glorified reward set touchdown pages, to editors and Substackers who use them as a car to flex how firmly their fingers are available on the market’s pulse.
I do know rather a lot about curating reward guides: earlier than becoming a member of The Business of Beauty in September, I had constructed a profession out of it as a magnificence author at New York Magazine’s The Strategist. Over the 4 years I spent writing (and search-engine optimising) lots of, I noticed them rework from a slew of generic options — reminiscent of mum equals Clarins lotion, dad equals painfully bland IPA — to slick lists with hyper-specified finds.
Picture them as a roadmap for the uninspired-gifter: Would the layman establish Victoria Beckham basis drops as the wonder reward of the season, or know to pick out the SpaceNK magnificence creation calendar over one from Nordstrom? For many magnificence manufacturers, they’re additionally a beacon: touchdown on a present information printed by a title like Allure or The Cut can then be used as a advertising and marketing instrument.
But not all reward guides are made equal, and plenty of have begun to perform barely like movie star ebook golf equipment — much less in regards to the content material, extra in regards to the alternative to ascertain style. Whilst I all the time leaf by way of these from my favorite Substackers, it’s price noting that quite a lot of their esoteric Etsy finds are liable to not arriving till effectively into the brand new 12 months. It’s additionally arduous to decide to suggestions of an $190 bottle of Marissa Zappas or a $400 Byredo based mostly on vibes alone.
Perhaps they’re greatest utilised as a useful resource for market analysis: After School’s Casey Lewis made a information of kinds after watching lots of of TikTookay want lists to decipher probably the most wanted items amongst Gen Z (Rhode eye patches, after all, have been high of the record). Meanwhile, the prominence of Laneige and Summer Fridays inside tween reward guides speaks to Gen Alpha’s continued love of skincare. I’m personally on the look-out for a breakthrough information for males’s grooming and skincare — the vast majority of which have but to maneuver past these primary brand-compiled choices. That’s the one which I’d be penning this 12 months.
Rachael Griffiths, Senior Editorial Associate
To Move the Growth Needle, Beauty Looks to the Derm Office
Consumers could also be pulling again on dear skincare and make-up, however they’re not reducing corners on the derm’s workplace or medspa as adoption of injectables grows.
L’Oréal Group is betting on their endurance. The firm’s Dec. 8 resolution to extend its stake in Swiss dermatology firm Galderma indicators renewed conviction in doctor-dispensed magnificence. It’s a full-circle second, as L’Oréal co-founded Galderma with Nestlé 44 years in the past however offered its stake in 2014. A decade later, it got here again, shopping for 10 % in 2024 and upping its holdings to twenty % this week, with two board seats doubtless on the way in which.
Galderma’s gross sales have been considerably extra strong than these of consumer-facing magnificence giants this 12 months. It reported 15 % internet gross sales development for the primary 9 months of 2025 and raised its full-year steering, marking a more healthy enhance than L’Oréal Group’s 1.2 % for a similar time interval, to not point out the gross sales declines that different magnificence firms skilled.
Galderma’s one-year-old prescription eczema therapy was its quickest grower, however injectables remained the spine of the enterprise with double-digit positive factors. Neuromodulators like Dysport and Relfydess drove the majority of injectable development for the corporate, whereas dermatological magnificence manufacturers together with drugstore staple Cetaphil to post-procedure line Alastin likewise rose within the double digits.
These positive factors marked much more energy than single-digit development in L’Oréal’s personal dermatological magnificence division that has been an enormous focus lately with its lineup that features La Roche-Posay, Skinceuticals, Cerave and the newly added Medik8.
As medical intervention is scaling quicker than shopper skincare, L’Oréal is betting on a continued structural shift. Growth prospects are usually not with out rising challenges, as regulators have began to eye the protection of fast-casual medspas which have helped drive mass shopper adoption, and aesthetics will be topic to altering magnificence tendencies as a lot as blush or eyeshadow — the rise of “filler fatigue” coincided with solely single-digit development Galderma’s filler manufacturers for the primary three quarters. But it’s arduous to not discover magnificence’s total medicalisation and the mainstream adoption of procedures, pointing to long-term potential for the class.
Liz Flora, Beauty Correspondent
What We’re Reading
John Demsey is again in magnificence. My buddy Rachel Strugatz over at Puck charted the previous Lauder govt’s comeback years. [Puck]
Could microdosing ozempic heal ADHD, anxiousness and alcoholism? Alt-wellness influencers appear to suppose so. [Dazed Beauty]
By positioning its deodorant as fancy — however not too fancy — Salt & Stone managed to construct a $140 million empire. Liz Flora caught up with them about what’s subsequent. [The Business of Beauty]
“All Fours” popularised the idea of the getting older cliff, “certain years in life when aging hits us hard and moves us forward at hyperspeed.” Emily Gould talks about it hitting her first. [The Cut]
Japan’s high-glam Sukeban wrestling league — whose athletes have been painted by the likes of Pat McGrath and Isamaya Ffrench — took to Miami this week with MAC international director of make-up Romero Jennings. [Dazed Beauty]
It-girls have physique glitter on their Christmas lists. [Bustle]