Too Faced launched in the late 1990s with the goal of bringing playfulness and bold creativity back into makeup. Known for colorful palettes, whimsical packaging, and its early embrace of cruelty-free positioning, the brand became a favorite among younger consumers seeking high-impact beauty with personality.
In 2016, Too Faced was acquired by Estée Lauder, tying it to a multinational conglomerate whose practices undercut the brand’s ethical claims. While Too Faced promotes a cruelty-free identity, its parent company continues to sell in markets where animal testing is legally required, making the stance inconsistent at the portfolio level.
More significantly, Estée Lauder’s chairman Ronald Lauder serves as president of the Jewish National Fund, an organization that controls 13% of land in Israel and has supported settlement expansion and military-aligned projects. Through this connection, Too Faced’s revenues help sustain a corporate structure tied to systemic human rights violations and apartheid infrastructure.
For a company that profits from both pink glitter and political violence, the name feels a little too on the nose.
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.