Inside the L’Oréal-Kering Deal: Why Beauty’s Future Lies in Longevity
- warwickluxretail
- 15 hours ago
- 5 min read
A €4bn acquisition, a 50-year partnership, and two of the world’s biggest luxury houses quietly redefining what beauty means.
By Ridhi Sofat
November 2025
Few names dominate their sectors like Kering and L’Oreal.
Kering, the Paris-based luxury group chaired François-Henri Pinault, owns some of fashion's influential maisons: Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen. Known for its creative direction and cultural relevance, Kering sits at the top of the luxury fashion pyramid, competing with conglomerates like LVMH for global dominance.
L’Oréal is the world’s largest beauty company. Its portfolio spans from mass-market brands like Maybelline to high-end names such as Lancôme, Giorgio Armani Beauty and Yves Saint Laurent Beatué. With more than a century of expertise, L’Oéal is a laboratory and marketing powerhouse, focused on science, scale and global reach.
So when these titans announced a partnership in October 2025, it was more than a corporate headline, but a statement about where the luxury industry is heading next.
The Deal Explained
The agreement, valued at €4 billion, sees L’Oréal acquiring Kering Beatué, Kering’s beauty subsidiary. The sale includes the rights to produce and distribute fragrances and beauty products for three of Kering’s fashion houses, Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga, under exclusive 50-year licenses. L’Oréal also gains full control of Creed, the fragrance brand known for Aventus and its heritage in artisanal perfumery. In return, Kering steps back from the beauty business, earning royalties while doubling down on its core fashion maisons.
In practice, this means that for the next half-century, L’Oréal will oversee everything from product development to global retail for these brands’ beauty lines, while paying royalties back to Kering. The long-term nature of the licences is notable and rare in luxury. It effectively binds the two companies together for decades.
But the transaction didn’t end there. Alongside it, Kering and L’Oréal announced a joint venture - a 50/50 partnership focused on luxury wellness and longevity. The goal is to combine L’Oréal’s expertise in skincare science, dermatology, and longevity research with Kering’s mastery of luxury client experiences and brand storytelling.
Strategic Logic: Why It Works for Both
The deal arrives at a pivotal moment for both companies.
For L’Oréal, the acquisition strengthens its position as the undisputed leader in luxury beauty. Adding Gucci, Bottega Veneta, and Balenciaga fills a gap in its high-fashion portfolio and secures future blockbusters in fragrance and skincare.
L’Oréal, already the world’s largest beauty group, reported €10.3 billion in Q3 2025 sales, up 4.2% year-on-year. Its luxury division, home to Lancôme, Yves Saint Laurent and now Gucci, remains the crown jewel. CEO Nicolas Hieronimus called Gucci’s potential as big as YSL Beauté, which already generates close to €3 billion annually. The addition of Creed, one of the top three niche fragrance brands globally, deepens L’Oréal’s dominance in this market.
For Kering, the move represents focus and simplification. After years of expansion and uneven growth, the group is refocusing on its core strength: fashion, leather goods, and jewellery. Beauty requires global supply chains, regulatory expertise, and scientific R&D - areas where L’Oréal already leads. This deal, thus, allows Kering to monetise beauty without managing its complex logistics, while maintaining creative control over its fashion houses.
In other words: L’Oréal gains scale, Kering gains focus. And both gain access to a fast-emerging market that sits between beauty and biotech.
The Legal Architecture of the Partnership
This alliance is as much a legal innovation as a commercial one.
The 50-year licensing structure gives L’Oréal full operational authority, from manufacturing to marketing and distribution, while protecting Kering’s intellectual property and creative autonomy. This ensures that both sides protect their core assets.
The joint venture, meanwhile, is legally separate from the licensing arrangement. It enables shared governance, investment, and R&D while mitigating regulatory risk in a market that touches both cosmetics and health.
It’s a structure that shows how modern luxury groups are using law as strategy, designing deals that fuse creativity, compliance and commercial foresight.
The Longevity Economy
The longevity venture is the second pillar of this alliance - and its most forward-looking.
Alongside the 4 billion sale of Kering Beaté, the two groups announced a 50/50 joint venture aimed at exploring opportunities where luxury, wellness and science converge.
In 2025, the beauty conversation shifted from ‘anti-ageing’ to longevity - a science-based, data-measurable approach to extending vitality, not just appearance. Consumers now view health and aesthetics as one continuum - ‘healthy ageing’ rather than ‘anti ageing’.
This change is reflected in market data. McKinsey’s Future of Wellness survey notes that up to 60% of consumers now prioritise healthy ageing as “very important,” driving what analysts call the “longevity economy.” Skincare that targets cellular health, nutritional supplements and treatments like cryotherapy or red-light therapy have moved from clinics to mainstream culture.
Consumers increasingly view health and appearance as one continuum: “healthy ageing” rather than “anti-ageing.” Consumers are shifting from symptom correction to root-cause intervention. This includes skincare that targets cellular health, nutrition supplements that influence epigenetic ageing, and spa-style treatments such as cryotherapy and red-light therapy.
For L’Oréal, this venture offers a way to push beyond surface-level beauty into the science of prevention and performance. Its recent Longevity Conference signalled this shift, where it discussed moving from symptom correction to root-cause intervention.
For Kering, it is an opportunity to translate that science into luxury content. Its brands have long sold aspiration through experience, design and emotion. The venture allows Kering to channel that expertise into a new category of luxury well-being, turning skincare into an experience. As longevity entrepreneur Alejandro Bataller puts it: ‘Being healthy, fresh, agile is the best representation of luxury nowadays.’
Together, the two companies are betting that the future of luxury lies in invisible consumption - how you sleep, eat, age and recover. Wellness has become the new couture and a new demographic of wealthy, health-conscious clientele who view time as their most finite currency has emerged.
As L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus explained, the collaboration will explore “new frontiers of wellness, combining the unrivalled expertise of L’Oréal with Kering’s luxury reach.” Kering CEO Luca de Meo described it as a move designed to “craft cutting-edge experiences and services” for a new kind of luxury consumer—one more interested in vitality than vanity.
Industry Impact
The deal’s significance extends far beyond the two companies involved. In a beauty market increasingly shaped by consolidation, the L’Oréal–Kering partnership sends a clear message: the next phase of growth will come from alliances, not acquisitions.
For global players like LVMH, Estée Lauder, and Puig, it raises the stakes. LVMH has already experimented with tech-driven skincare and experiential wellness, while Estée Lauder continues to invest heavily in to dermatological science. But this joint venture formalises a model that others have only been circling — one that merges fashion’s storytelling with biotechnology’s precision.
It also marks a turning point in how conglomerates structure value. Where expansion once meant adding brands, it now means building cross-sector expertise - the intersection of heritage, wellness and innovation. The result is a blueprint for how luxury groups might evolve in the decade ahead.
A Quiet Reorientation
What makes this deal remarkable is not just its scale, but its symbolism.
L’Oréal gains time—literally, through decades-long licences and its investment in the science of longevity. Kering gains freedom—to concentrate on fashion while remaining part of beauty’s next evolution.
It’s a pragmatic partnership that captures where the industry is heading - toward a future where beauty, wellness, and luxury move as one.
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