Smashbox was founded out of a Los Angeles photo studio, building its name on long-wear, camera-ready cosmetics that bridged professional artistry and consumer use. Its positioning as a high-performance brand with a California edge helped distinguish it in the crowded beauty market.
Since its acquisition by Estée Lauder in 2010, Smashbox’s operations and global expansion have been tied to the strategy of a multinational conglomerate. While the brand presents itself as cruelty-free, it remains part of a corporate portfolio that sells in markets where animal testing may still be required by law. More significantly, Smashbox contributes to the profits and political influence of Estée Lauder, whose chairman Ronald Lauder also leads the Jewish National Fund. The JNF is directly linked to land dispossession, settlement expansion, and military-aligned infrastructure in Israel.
Smashbox markets the look of perfection, but its ownership connects it to political and structural harms that extend far beyond the beauty industry.
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.