L'Oreal

L'Oréal Paris sits in the sweet spot of affordable products with a quality reputation, spanning makeup, skincare and hair care. Shoppers single out lines like Revitalift for visible skincare results and Elvive for hair care that's hard to tell apart from pricier rivals. Results vary by product and skin type, but it's widely seen as good value.

It depends on what you want, since the brand is genuinely broad. For base, True Match foundation earns praise for its wide shade range; for skin, the Revitalift line is the go-to for fine lines; for hair, Elvive is the accessible everyday hero. Pick the category you shop most and start with its flagship.

It often is. Compared with more matte-leaning drugstore rivals, L'Oréal Paris tends to deliver more hydrating, semi-matte, skin-like finishes, which many find better suited to drier or sensitive complexions. As always, patch testing a new formula first is the safest way to confirm it agrees with you.

The famous line began as "Because I'm worth it," created in 1973 by McCann copywriter Ilon Specht for a L'Oréal hair colour campaign and introduced by actress Joanne Dusseau. It later became "Because you're worth it" in the mid-2000s and "Because we're worth it" in 2009, evolving but keeping its empowering core.

L'Oréal traces back to French chemist Eugène Schueller, who developed a hair dye and registered his company in Paris on 31 July 1909. From that hair-colour beginning the company expanded across the whole beauty business, and today it's headquartered in Clichy, near Paris.

Yes. As of 2024 L'Oréal is the world's largest cosmetics company, owning 36 brands. That scale is why so many makeup, skincare and hair names you know sit somewhere under its umbrella, from consumer staples to luxury and dermatological lines.

L'Oréal is a publicly listed French company, but the founder's family remains its largest shareholder, with the Bettencourt family holding around 35% as of late 2023 and Nestlé holding about 20%. After Liliane Bettencourt died in 2017, her stake passed to her daughter Françoise Bettencourt Meyers.

L'Oréal began in-vitro tissue testing in 1979 and says it has not tested its products or ingredients on animals anywhere in the world since 1989. The nuance is that some countries it sells in, such as China, have at times required animal testing of imported cosmetics by their own regulators.

It is, and the company has acknowledged it. Founder Eugène Schueller was a Nazi sympathiser and a member of the pro-fascist group La Cagoule, and provided it financial support during the German occupation of France. It's an uncomfortable part of the brand's past that L'Oréal itself has conceded.

Beyond L'Oréal Paris, the group has acquired a string of household names over the years, including The Body Shop (later sold), YSL Beauté, NYX Cosmetics, IT Cosmetics and the luxury skincare brand Aesop. Its portfolio is organised across mass, professional, luxury and dermatological tiers.

L'Oréal has been an official partner of the Cannes Film Festival since 1997, and many of its beauty ambassadors walk the red carpet there each year. It's a long-running link that has helped cement the brand's glamorous, cinematic image.