Welcome back to Full Coverage.
This week, I’m in London, planning, strategising and dreaming with the rest of the BoF leadership team on what’s to come in 2026 — we’re thinking big!
As such, this week Full Coverage is instead a team effort. I really can’t say enough about my team: Brennan Kilbane, Daniela Morosini, Liz Flora and Rachael Griffiths. Not only were they the best writers and reporters at their previous publications and during their freelance lives, but their ambition, spirit and encouragement are very largely the reason The Business of Beauty has grown so much in the last few years. I actually celebrated three years at BoF last Friday — and I’m so proud of what we have built together.
Read on to see what they’ve got; it’s good. I’ll be back next week just in time for a banger of a pre-Christmas read. See you then.
Priya Rao
In this newsletter:
- Estée Lauder looks at firing up its incubation machine
- A Real Housewives and Sephora crossover episode
- What does a good gift guide actually look like?
- L’Oréal’s bet on doctor-dispensed beauty
A New and Improved Estée Lauder (Again)
The Estée Lauder beat is full of ups and downs. The last few years have yielded more of the latter — job cuts, tepid sales growth and rumours of brand divestments. But the company’s active turnaround period can also produce news that sounds out as more than just business as usual for a good reason.
The latest example? At a Reuters conference in New York last week, chief executive Stéphane de La Faverie told the crowd that he sees both developing and buying new brands as key parts of its growth strategy.
Generally speaking, beauty conglomerates like to buy brands rather than incubate them. While the big paychecks many hot labels expect can hurt the acquirer’s bottom line, purchasing brands outright allows a holding company to immediately add to its top line with ready sales. Big conglomerates can also be slower-moving, meaning they do better at operational expansion into new markets or retailers, or streamlining supply chains than building a brand from zero.
Estée Lauder Companies knows this better than most — its most recent brand-building exercise, 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 just eighteen months before it was wound down in 2017. (For what it’s worth, I loved many of its products, especially the lipstick in You’re Welcome, a minx-y red. One of the line’s developers, Sarah Creal, now has her own lauded brand with a more upscale feel.)
The company has about $2 billion in cash, so acquisitions are certainly possible: They would just need to be calculated with extreme caution. Previous purchases have yielded mixed results: its buyout of Deciem, The Ordinary’s parent company, was an unprecedented win and helped it expand its reach with young shoppers. Deciem is also spitting out more sub-brands, like Niod and Avestan, per de La Faverie’s incubation thesis. But the cosmetics brands it bought in the mid-aughts like Too Faced and Becca have had struggles — Becca was wound down in 2021, while the company recorded a $50 million impairment against Too Faced in the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year.
If ELC wants to get back in the incubation kitchen, my suggestions would be a more affordable fragrance line and a more modern hair care brand. They own Dr Jart+, but they should also get more skin in the K-beauty game somehow — but then again, everyone should.
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 current season of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and tell you about the slow death of Wild Rose Beauty, the skincare line founded by cast member, former Mormon and current spiritual wayfarer Whitney Rose.
In last week’s episode, Rose shared a tearful exchange with her husband on the back porch of their modern farmhouse, during which she pins Wild Rose Beauty’s failure on her husband’s encouragement to structure it as a multilevel marketing scheme, instead of approaching retailers as Rose intended. Wild Rose Beauty then merged with Sol People, a company owned by her husband Justin, that offered a wide variety of products, including supplements and a “brain fitness” headset, primarily through direct selling.
“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 said, wearing a mesh bodysuit and jeans. She said she is now “fighting tooth and nail” to get out of the deal and rescue her brand name.
I’ve been following the plight of Wild Rose Beauty with hawk-like attention ever since Rose’s season three revelation that she had sunk her family’s entire savings into the enterprise. But I was surprised that Rose had met with Sephora — or that Sephora had met with Rose.
To those unfamiliar with the Bravo franchise, allow me to fill you in. Despite proudly identifying as capital-H Housewives, most cast members on the Bravo franchise attempt to parlay their reality TV fame into off-screen entrepreneurship success, an ambition fuelled in part by Bethenny Frankel’s $120 million sale of her beverage label Skinnygirl to Beam Global in 2011. Since then, the women have spawned innumerable consumer ventures — for apparel, toaster ovens, three-wick candles, sex toys, weed gummies and plenty, of course, in beauty, one of the few commodities these cast members have in spades.
It should be noted that no Housewife-founded beauty brand has much commercial success, much less inked a major 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 people, Kristin Taekman, the RHONY two-season-wonder who launched a line of nail polishes with Ricky’s NYC before the retailer’s shutdown in 2018.
How close did Rose get? Sephora declined to comment, so my best guess is not very far.
Brennan Kilbane, News and Features Editor
12 Days of Gift Guide Fatigue
Every year, it feels as if gift guide frenzy has hit a peak — only for it to push even further the following holiday season.
That’s proved to be the case in 2025, with with gift suggestions shoved shoppers from all angles, from brands like Charlotte Tilbury, who build glorified gift set landing pages while editors and Substackers use them as a vehicle to flex how firmly their fingers are on the market’s pulse.
I know a lot about curating gift guides: before joining The Business of Beauty in September, I had built a career out of it as a beauty writer at New York Magazine’s The Strategist. Over the four years I spent writing (and search-engine optimising) hundreds, I saw them transform from a slew of generic suggestions — such as 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 identify Victoria Beckham foundation drops as the beauty gift of the season, or know to select the SpaceNK beauty advent calendar over one from Nordstrom? For many beauty brands, they’re also a beacon: landing on a gift guide published by a title like Allure or The Cut can then be used as a marketing tool.
But not all gift guides are made equal, and many have begun to function slightly like celebrity book clubs — less about the content, more about the opportunity to establish taste. Whilst I always leaf through those from my favourite Substackers, it’s worth noting that a number of their esoteric Etsy finds are at risk of not arriving until well into the new year. It’s also hard to commit to recommendations of an $190 bottle of Marissa Zappas or a $400 Byredo based on vibes alone.
Perhaps they’re best utilised as a resource for market research: After School’s Casey Lewis made a guide of sorts after watching hundreds of TikTok wish lists to decipher the most sought after gifts amongst Gen Z (Rhode eye patches, of course, were top of the list). Meanwhile, the prominence of Laneige and Summer Fridays within tween gift guides speaks to Gen Alpha’s continued love of skincare. I’m personally on the look-out for a breakthrough guide for men’s grooming and skincare — the majority of which have yet to move beyond those basic brand-compiled options. That’s the one that I’d be writing this year.
Rachael Griffiths, Senior Editorial Associate
To Move the Growth Needle, Beauty Looks to the Derm Office
Consumers may be pulling back on pricey skincare and makeup, but they’re not cutting corners at the derm’s office or medspa as adoption of injectables grows.
L’Oréal Group is betting on their staying power. The company’s Dec. 8 decision to increase its stake in Swiss dermatology company Galderma signals renewed conviction in doctor-dispensed beauty. It’s a full-circle moment, as L’Oréal co-founded Galderma with Nestlé 44 years ago but sold its stake in 2014. A decade later, it came back, buying 10 percent in 2024 and upping its holdings to 20 percent this week, with two board seats likely on the way.
Galderma’s sales have been significantly more robust than those of consumer-facing beauty giants this year. It reported 15 percent net sales growth for the first nine months of 2025 and raised its full-year guidance, marking a healthier increase than L’Oréal Group’s 1.2 percent for the same time period, not to mention the sales declines that other beauty companies experienced.
Galderma’s one-year-old prescription eczema treatment was its fastest grower, but injectables remained the backbone of the business with double-digit gains. Neuromodulators like Dysport and Relfydess drove the bulk of injectable growth for the company, while dermatological beauty brands including drugstore staple Cetaphil to post-procedure line Alastin likewise rose in the double digits.
These gains marked even more strength than single-digit growth in L’Oréal’s own dermatological beauty division that has been a huge focus in recent years with its lineup that includes La Roche-Posay, Skinceuticals, Cerave and the newly added Medik8.
As clinical intervention is scaling faster than consumer skincare, L’Oréal is betting on a continued structural shift. Growth prospects are not without rising challenges, as regulators have started to eye the safety of fast-casual medspas that have helped drive mass consumer adoption, and aesthetics can be subject to changing beauty trends as much as blush or eyeshadow — the rise of “filler fatigue” coincided with only single-digit growth Galderma’s filler brands for the first three quarters. But it’s hard to not notice beauty’s overall medicalisation and the mainstream adoption of procedures, pointing to long-term potential for the category.
Liz Flora, Beauty Correspondent
What We’re Reading
John Demsey is back in beauty. My friend Rachel Strugatz over at Puck charted the former Lauder executive’s comeback years. [Puck]
Could microdosing ozempic heal ADHD, anxiety and alcoholism? Alt-wellness influencers seem to think so. [Dazed Beauty]
By positioning its deodorant as fancy — but not too fancy — Salt & Stone managed to build a $140 million empire. Liz Flora caught up with them about what’s next. [The Business of Beauty]
“All Fours” popularised the concept of the aging 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 global director of makeup Romero Jennings. [Dazed Beauty]
It-girls have body glitter on their Christmas lists. [Bustle]
