In 2023, Estée Lauder took full ownership of Tom Ford Beauty, cementing the label’s place inside one of the world’s largest beauty conglomerates. The brand is marketed as progressive and refined, but its reach is inseparable from Estée Lauder’s global retail and distribution systems. Tom Ford products are sold in markets where animal testing may still be required by law, placing the brand within a supply chain that funds testing to maintain access.
The larger issue is structural. Estée Lauder’s chairman, Ronald Lauder, is president of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that owns 13 percent of Israeli land and plays a central role in settlement expansion and exclusionary land policies. Tom Ford Beauty profits contribute to a corporate parent whose leadership is financially and politically tied to Israel’s apartheid infrastructure.
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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