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10/06/2009L'Oreal, hair and sun-cream pioneer, hits 100 as world leader

The market for L'Oreal expanded from "gay Paris" in the early years to the globalised world of supermarkets and glamour: a story of the consumer society.

Paris -- In 1909 French chemist Eugene Schueller concocted a safe dye for hair, calling it l'Aureale after a popular hair style of the moment in a city which was already a byword for style and fashion.

On Thursday that business, now an empire, a top French brand and a leader in the world of cosmetics under the name of L'Oreal, celebrates 100 years of satisfying vanity and riding the long rise of spending on body care products.

Since the early years when Schueller invented new recipes by night and delivered to hairdressers by bicycle by day, L'Oreal survived through the Great Depression, two world wars and the growth of competition in ever-more prosperous economies.

However, Schueller attracted controversy for having extreme right-wing connections before and after the occupation of France in World War II.

The founding family was in the news recently over litigation between Liliane Bettencourt, Schueller's daughter, and her own daughter Francoise Bettencourt-Myers. The daughter took court action to challenge gifts totalling nearly EUR 1 billion (USD 1.42 billion) from the family fortune by her mother to a friend, a photographer.


The Swiss food giant Nestle acquired 28.9 percent of the group in 2004.

But Liliane Bettencourt remains the top shareholder, making her one of the wealthiest women in the world with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 2008 at USD 23 billion. She herself began working in the business at the age of 15, mixing cosmetics and labelling bottles of shampoo.

L'Oreal is one of three top world groups in this market which, over 100 years, reached down through the middle classes to new segments of working people in emerging economies.

Personal body care is now a multinational business.

The market for L'Oreal expanded from "gay Paris" in the early years to the globalised world of supermarkets and glamour: a story of the consumer society.

"The globalisation of the cosmetics market is just beginning...we reach scarcely a fifth of the inhabitants of the planet," chief executive Jean-Paul Agon said in remarks to mark the anniversary. The current crisis should be a stimulus and the company "has never been so much on the attack."

The group, under its previous chief executive, Welshman Lindsay Owen-Jones, turned in an astonishing run of ever-rising profits: for 23 years running it raised profits by more than 10 percent per year.

The empire now constitutes one of the biggest family fortunes in France, but in its hundredth year it too is being tarnished by the effects of the global economic crisis.


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