L’Oréal Group’s fourth-quarter sales rose 6% like-for-like to €11.2 billion, slightly below analyst expectations of a 6.3% increase. This marks an acceleration in sales growth, following a lower third-quarter revenue increase of 4.2%. For the 2025 full year, ended December 31, group sales were up 4% to €44 billion.
“The past 18 months have been challenging for L’Oréal,” wrote Bernstein analyst Callum Elliott in a note shared on February 10, ahead of the earnings. “From the heights of 2021, when global beauty growth peaked at around 8%, 2025 growth slowed to around the 4% level — its slowest pace since 2013 to 2015 in the wake of the European debt crisis. Exiting 2025, however, we see green shoots of a recovery.”
By comparison, Estée Lauder Companies sales grew 4% to $4.16 billion in its second quarter, while LVMH’s perfumes and cosmetics division reported a 1% organic sales decrease to €2.13 billion in Q4. Elliott noted the “very mixed messages from peers, with weak beauty numbers at LVMH, but stronger performance at Estée, which muddy the read-across for luxury [as a whole]”.
At L’Oréal, dermatological beauty (including Cerave and La Roche-Posay) led company growth, with sales up 11.5% in the fourth quarter. Professional products (Kerastase, Redken) were up 7.6%, consumer products (L’Oréal Paris, Maybelline) were up 4.8%, while L’Oréal Luxe (Kiehl’s, Yves Saint Laurent) was up 4.5%. From a geographic standpoint, sales in North America (up 8.6%) and Latin America (up 8.2%) offset softer sales in North Asia (up 0.6%). Europe was up 6.6%, and SAPMENA-SSA (South Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa) was up 10.7%.
“As we had promised, organic top-line growth accelerated quarter after quarter, boosted by the step-up in our launch plan and supported by a gradually improving beauty market,” L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus said in a statement. The executive is “optimistic” about the global beauty market in 2026, and is “confident in [L’Oréal’s] ability to keep outperforming, thanks to L’Oréal’s multi-division category strategy, and to achieve another year of growth in sales and profit”.
