Aramis, launched in 1964, was Estée Lauder’s first men’s grooming brand and helped establish designer fragrance as a mainstream category. Positioned around bold scents and traditional masculinity, it became one of the earliest prestige colognes to gain wide retail distribution. Today Aramis functions less as an innovator and more as a legacy brand within Estée Lauder’s portfolio, kept alive through global licensing and department store sales rather than cultural relevance.
Estée Lauder’s corporate structure is inseparable from its chairman, Ronald Lauder, who also serves as president of the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF controls 13% of land in Israel, restricts ownership and leasing to Jews, and has funded illegal settlement expansion and military-linked projects. Through Lauder’s leadership and wealth, Estée Lauder and its brands, including Aramis, are materially tied to Israeli apartheid and systems of Palestinian dispossession.
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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