Clinique was launched in 1968 and became the first cosmetics line developed under dermatologist guidance. It marketed itself as hypoallergenic and fragrance-free, gaining a reputation for safety and skin health.
Since its inception, Clinique has operated under Estée Lauder. Like other subsidiaries, it is tied to Estée Lauder’s global practices, including product sales in mainland China where animal testing may still be legally required. This undermines its positioning as an ethical or cruelty-free brand.
More significantly, Estée Lauder’s chairman Ronald Lauder is president of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that controls 13% of Israeli land and supports illegal settlement expansion and military-linked initiatives. Clinique benefits from the scale and capital of a parent company implicated in systems of apartheid and 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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