AERIN is a beauty and lifestyle brand founded by Aerin Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder. Since its launch, it has operated under the ownership of Estée Lauder, one of the world’s largest beauty conglomerates. While AERIN positions itself as refined and timeless, it benefits from the global scale, manufacturing infrastructure, and market access of a parent company with a track record of animal testing compliance and political complicity. AERIN products are sold in regions where animal testing is mandated, making it part of a regulatory system that contradicts its polished, ethical image.
More critically, Estée Lauder’s chairman, Ronald Lauder, is president of the Jewish National Fund—a quasi-governmental body that controls 13% of land in Israel and excludes Palestinians from leasing or owning it. The JNF has supported illegal settlement expansion and military-linked charities. Through Lauder’s leadership and financial influence, Estée Lauder is directly tied to the political and economic structures of Israeli apartheid.
AERIN presents itself as beauty with heritage. What it delivers is inherited power sustained by systems of harm.
Estée Lauder is rated High Impact because it concentrates cultural and financial power at a global scale while channelling wealth into one of the most entrenched institutions of Israeli apartheid. With Ronald Lauder at the helm of the Jewish National Fund, the company is directly bound to the mechanisms of land confiscation, settlement growth, and military-aligned infrastructure in Palestine.
The impact is structural: dozens of distinct brands—from mass-market staples like Clinique and Rimmel to luxury houses like La Mer and Tom Ford Beauty—all funnel revenue into the same corporate centre. Every purchase strengthens a conglomerate that not only profits from extractive and exploitative supply chains but also invests in political projects sustaining dispossession.
Where other beauty firms may be complicit through regulatory concessions such as animal testing in China, Estée Lauder stands out because its leadership transforms consumer spending into political capital for an apartheid regime. That combination of market dominance and direct political entanglement makes it one of the most urgent boycott targets in the sector.
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