The Jar

2024

The shelf. In a pharmacy the jars look like rivals: different names, different prices, different promises. This story asks what people ask about them: who owns the brands, whether the claims hold up, whether anything has been harmful, and whether anything works. Each answer is what a regulator, a court, a company or a trial said, with the speaker named. One thing up front: nothing here is a reason to stop using sunscreen, and the sunscreen scenes say why. It is a record, not medical advice; ask a doctor about your own skin.

Jan 2017

One house, many names. L’Oréal’s own site lists Lancôme and Kiehl’s among its luxury brands, and La Roche-Posay and CeraVe among its dermatological ones. Its history says it added Helena Rubinstein, La Roche-Posay and Kiehl’s between 1988 and 2005. CeraVe came in 2017, when Valeant sold it with two other brands for $1.3 billion in cash. A department-store cream and a drugstore moisturiser can have the same maker.

31 May 2024

Clinique and The Ordinary. The Estée Lauder Companies lists Clinique and DECIEM among its brands, and DECIEM’s own site lists The Ordinary as one of its brands. The company first invested in DECIEM in 2017, became its majority owner in 2021, and closed on the remaining interests on 31 May 2024 for an estimated $860 million, by its own account. Two shelves that seem unrelated lead to one owner.

2023

Four more owners. Unilever lists Dove and Pond’s among its power brands and agreed in 2021 to buy Paula’s Choice. Procter & Gamble lists Olay and SK-II. Shiseido completed its purchase of Drunk Elephant on 6 November 2019. Neutrogena and Aveeno belong to Kenvue, the company Johnson & Johnson separated in 2023, keeping 9.5 per cent at first; Kenvue’s own site now carries a banner about a Kimberly-Clark deal, and we could not confirm from an open page whether it has closed.

2024

How few, how big. Fifteen brands in this picture, six owners; these are the ones we traced, not a count of the whole shelf. L’Oréal’s report gives its 2024 sales as €43,487 million, of which skin care and sun care were €16,803.7 million, and its own estimate that the whole beauty market was worth more than €290 billion. By our division L’Oréal’s sales are about 15 per cent of that market, which also includes hair, make-up and perfume; L’Oréal does not split out skin care, and we found no open figure for the share of skin care alone.

31 Dec 2024

Who owns L’Oréal. Its 2024 report puts the Bettencourt Meyers family at 34.76 per cent and Nestlé at 20.14. In December 2021 L’Oréal bought back 4 per cent of its own shares from Nestlé for €8,904 million; Nestlé fell from 23.3 to 20.1 per cent, and the family rose from 33.3 to 34.7 because the number of shares fell. Three directors come from the family and two are linked to Nestlé. Holdings and board seats are the record; they are not evidence of wrongdoing.

29 Aug 2025

The big funds. Procter & Gamble’s 2025 proxy lists two holders above 5 per cent: BlackRock at 6.65 per cent and The Vanguard Group at 9.60, figures as of December 2023 from filings of early 2024. These are funds holding shares for the people invested in them, a passive holding, not ownership by the fund company for itself; the story Who Owns BlackRock and Vanguard? follows that. We show this table for P&G only: U.S. proxy filings for Estée Lauder and Kenvue could not be read for this story, and Unilever and Shiseido report their holders elsewhere and are not drawn. A holding is a fact, not evidence of wrongdoing.

1946

Who made the market. In 1909 the chemist Eugène Schueller founded the firm that became L’Oréal; its history says his dyes were “kinder and gentler to skin and hair.” In New York in the 1930s Estée Lauder sold a skin cream in Manhattan salons, and in 1946 she and her husband launched their company. Helena Rubinstein opened a salon in Melbourne in 1902 and sold Crème Valaze. The historian Geoffrey Jones said in an interview that she and Elizabeth Arden transformed salons from places once thought the moral equivalent of brothels to palaces of opulence and style.

1924

How Pond’s sold itself. Pond’s sold cold cream from 1907 and ran its first big campaign in 1916; by 1923 the growth in sales had slowed, because of competition. Its agency, J. Walter Thompson, found that middle-class women were equating price with quality and paying several times more for imported creams. The answer was endorsements by society women, from 1924 into the 1950s; sales of the creams rose nearly 17 per cent a year until 1929. Pond’s is a Unilever brand today.

2022

Not approved before sale. In the U.S. the FDA does not approve cosmetics before they are sold, except colour additives. Companies must see that their products are safe, but until 2022 the law required no specific safety tests and the FDA could not order a cosmetic recalled. The Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022, which the FDA calls its biggest expansion of powers since 1938, lets it order a recall when a cosmetic may cause serious harm, and makes companies report serious adverse events and keep records that support their safety claims. In October 2026 the FDA issued final guidance on those mandatory recalls.

2025

A cosmetic or a drug. The line is what a product is for. Cleansing or beautifying makes it a cosmetic; treating disease or changing how the body works makes it a drug, which must be approved or meet FDA rules for its category, as sunscreens do. A moisturiser sold with sun protection is both. “Cosmeceutical” has no meaning in the law, and the FDA says there is no formal definition of “natural” on a label; none of the FDA pages we read defines “clean,” a word companies use.

30 Jun 2014

Accused, settled, banned. In 2014 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission put a proposed consent order against L’Oréal USA on the public record. Its complaint alleged that ads for Lancôme Génifique and L’Oréal Paris Youth Code said they worked by targeting users’ genes, and that Génifique was “clinically proven” to give perfectly luminous skin in 85 per cent of women; the order would bar gene claims without competent and reliable scientific evidence, for twenty years. A complaint is an accusation and a settlement is not a finding of guilt, and we found no L’Oréal statement in the pages we could open. Separately, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority, which had issued guidance that digital retouching must not mislead, banned two L’Oréal ads in 2011, one for a Lancôme foundation with Julia Roberts.

30 Nov 2009

Europe’s list. The EU’s 2009 Cosmetics Regulation bans every substance on its Annex II, which ran to 1,328 numbered entries in the first text, and bans substances classed in the top two categories for causing cancer, gene damage or harm to reproduction, with narrow exceptions; those in the third need the EU’s safety committee to find them safe. The FDA’s page, by our count, lists eleven entries it bans or restricts by regulation, one of them a labelling rule. The lists are not like for like: the FDA says any ingredient that makes a cosmetic harmful as directed is already against the law, listed or not, and that the burden is on it to prove harm.

27 Jul 2026

Talc. Lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson allege that Johnson’s Baby Powder, because of traces of asbestos in talc, caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma; the Third Circuit wrote that some suits succeeded in verdicts, some failed, others settled, and more followed into the tens of thousands. J&J denies it, says its powder is safe, and says it has won 16 of 17 ovarian cases tried in 11 years. The FDA says studies have “not conclusively demonstrated” a link between talc powders and ovarian cancer and that more research is needed. In October 2019 an FDA test found chrysotile asbestos in one bottle, no more than 0.00002 per cent by J&J’s account; J&J recalled the lot and says over 60 tests found none.

27 Jul 2026

The subsidiary. J&J then created a subsidiary to hold the talc claims and put it into bankruptcy; the Third Circuit ordered the case dismissed in 2023 because it was not in financial distress, which says nothing on cancer, and a later plan through a subsidiary called Red River Talc was denied in March 2025. In November 2025 the FDA withdrew its proposed rule on testing talc for asbestos to assess comments; the 2022 law still requires one. As of 27 July 2026, J&J proposed to resolve the roughly 76,000 remaining ovarian claims, by its account for $5.5 billion; the proposal is not final and depends on at least 95 per cent of claims taking part, and J&J says its products did not cause the cancers.

14 Jul 2021

Benzene and mercury. In July 2021 J&J recalled five Neutrogena and Aveeno aerosol sunscreen lines after its tests found low levels of benzene, a human carcinogen; it said benzene is not an ingredient and that daily exposure at those levels would not be expected to cause harm. The FDA says people should keep using sunscreen. Mercury is a different matter, and not a shelf brand: the FDA advises people not to use over-the-counter skin-lightening products with high levels of mercury or hydroquinone, which it links to kidney and nerve damage and lasting skin harm, and says children and pregnant people face higher risk. The CDC’s 2019 case was a cream obtained from Mexico.

8 Dec 2022

Two open questions. PFAS, chemicals that break down very slowly, are used in some cosmetics; in December 2025 the FDA published its required report and said its assessment “underscores significant data gaps.” For hair straighteners, the NIH’s Sister Study followed 33,947 women for about 11 years; among 378 uterine cancers, women who reported using straighteners more than four times a year had 2.55 times the rate of those who never did (likely range 1.46 to 4.45). That is an association from what women reported, not proof that the products caused the cancers, and the authors ask for the finding to be replicated. The lead author called uterine cancer relatively rare; the study found no association between dyes or perms and uterine cancer.

2014

What SPF measures. SPF compares the sun exposure that burns you with the product on to the exposure that burns you without it; the FDA says it is not a count of hours in the sun, and that it mainly shows protection against UVB, the rays that burn. “Broad spectrum” means the product also protects against UVA. Labs test with 2 mg of sunscreen per square centimetre of skin, and people were found to apply about 0.39 to 1.0, so many get less than the label number: a reason to apply generously and reapply every two hours, as the FDA and the American Academy of Dermatology say, not a reason to skip it. The FDA says at least SPF 15, the AAD SPF 30 or higher, and about an ounce for an adult. In the U.S. sunscreens are regulated as drugs.

12 Jun 2025

Tested off the shelf. In June 2025 the consumer group CHOICE tested one batch of each of 20 popular SPF 50 and 50+ sunscreens sold in Australia, with ten adult volunteers, and reported that 16 did not reach their label. CHOICE itself says this does not mean sunscreen doesn’t work: any sunscreen is better than none, and even SPF 20 or 30 gives significant protection. Neutrogena’s maker, Kenvue, said it stands by the SPF 50 label on the lotion that scored 24; one La Roche-Posay product scored 72 and a Neutrogena lotion 56. Makers disputed the results, one withdrew its lowest-scoring product, and the Australian regulator then raised concerns over 20 sunscreens and several were recalled.

20 Jan 2011

Does sunscreen cut cancer? In 1992 researchers in Nambour, Queensland, assigned 1,621 residents to daily SPF 15-plus sunscreen or to use it as they chose. After 4.5 years the number of squamous-cell tumours fell (rate ratio 0.61), though the number of people with a first skin cancer did not differ clearly, and there was no harmful effect of daily use. Ten years after the trial ended, the daily group had 11 melanomas to the other group’s 22, a difference that could narrowly still be chance, but for invasive melanoma, the dangerous kind, it was 3 against 11, a difference that passed the test. The authors concluded that melanoma may be preventable by regular sunscreen use in adults.

2017

What works. Tretinoin, a vitamin A derivative, was the first retinoid the FDA approved for acne, in 1971, and in 1995 for sun-damaged facial skin. In a 16-week trial of 30 people with sun-damaged skin, 14 of 15 improved on the face against none given plain cream, and the side effect was irritation; it is a prescription drug with a caution about sun exposure, not a cosmetic, and nothing here covers retinol creams. A Cochrane review of 77 eczema trials found moisturisers reduced flares (six trials, moderate-quality evidence), and found no reliable evidence that one moisturiser beats another. For eczema, dermatologists call a fragrance-free moisturiser after a bath one of the best treatments, and name petroleum jelly as an inexpensive option for children.