Investigation hyperlinks baby labour to Lancôme and Estée Lauder perfumes

Two major beauty companies have been accused of being complicit in child labour, after an investigation found children were being used to pick ingredients for luxury perfumes. 

Suppliers of jasmine for Lancôme and Aerin Beauty allegedly hired young children in Egypt for as little as £1.18 a day to pick the flowers for use in three luxury products – Lancôme Idôle L’Intense and Ikat Jasmine and Limone Di Sicilia for Aerin Beauty – according to the BBC. 

A 100ml vial of Lancôme Idôle L’Intense sells for £125, while Ikat Jasmine goes for £150, and Limone Di Sicilia for £160. 

BBC reporters went undercover in jasmine farms across Egypt, which produces around half of the world’s jasmine, to film children undertaking gruelling work to pick the precious flower. 

One woman, from Gharbia in the heart of Egypt’s jasmine region, told the BBC that she is forced to wake her family up at 3am every day to begin picking jasmine flowers before the sun damages them. 

BBC reporters went undercover in jasmine farms across Egypt, which produces around half of the world’s jasmine, to film children undertaking gruelling work to pick the precious flower

Suppliers of jasmine for Lancôme and Aerin Beauty allegedly hired young children in Egypt for as little as £1.18 a day to pick the flowers for use in three luxury products

Heba said she needed her four children, aged between five and 15, to help as they earn more money if they pick more flowers. 

She said she works on land owned by someone else, and so owes a third of her wages to the landowner. 

BBC reporters said they witnessed children under the age of 15 picking jasmine in at least four different locations across the region.

Independent perfumer Christophe Laudamiel said that the onus was on major beauty houses, also known as ‘the masters’, as they strictly control the industry surrounding ingredients used in perfumes.   

‘The masters’ interest is to have the cheapest oil possible to put in the fragrance bottle,’ and then to sell it at the highest possible price, Laudamiel, who spent years working inside one of the fragrance houses, said. 

‘They actually don’t govern the salary or the wages of the harvesters, nor the actual price of jasmine, because they are beyond that. 

But the budgets the beauty houses set piled on pressure to massively lower the wages of pickers. 

BBC reporters said they witnessed children under the age of 15 picking jasmine in at least four different locations across the region

One woman, from Gharbia in the heart of Egypt’s jasmine region, told the BBC that she is forced to wake her family up at 3am every day to begin picking jasmine flowers before the sun damages them

‘There’s a big disconnect between the preciousness that is talked about in the marketing talk, and what is actually given to the harvesters,’ he added.

The UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, told the BBC following its investigation. 

‘On paper, they [the industry] are promising so many good things, like supply chain transparency and the fight against child labour. Looking at this footage, they are not actually doing things that they promised to do.’

A spokesperson for Estée Lauder, Aerin Beauty’s parent company, told MailOnline:   

‘We believe the rights of all children should be protected and have contacted our suppliers to investigate this very serious matter. 

‘We recognize the complex socioeconomic environment surrounding the local jasmine supply chain and we are taking action to gain better transparency and work toward improving the livelihoods of sourcing communities.’ 

A spokesperson for L’Oréal, Lancôme’s parent company, told MailOnline: ‘L’Oréal is deeply committed to respecting and protecting Human Rights – and believe that child labour is completely unacceptable.

‘We regularly audit our suppliers and always act immediately if a problem is identified.

‘This is what we are doing in Egypt, where we indirectly source a small percentage of the jasmine used in our products and where we identified the problem last fall after the last harvest and before the BBC reached out to us.

‘Since then, we have been putting concrete actions in place ahead of the upcoming June harvest. To drive systemic change in support of local communities, we are working in partnership with the Government of Egypt, the Fair Labor Association, the International Labour Organisation and other industry players.

‘We are very disappointed that the BBC chose not to include the concrete actions in Egypt which we started to implement prior to them contacting us and which we have actively shared with them’.