Dealmaking heats up as Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Unilever target India growth

India is no longer just a promising beauty market. It is becoming the industry’s most actively contested one. Within a month, three transactions and investment moves have highlighted that shift. Estée Lauder moved to acquire the remaining stake in Forest Essentials, taking full control of the Indian luxury Ayurveda brand after an 18-year partnership. Reports also emerged that L’Oréal is in talks to acquire a majority stake in Innovist, the fast-growing Indian direct-to-consumer beauty group behind Bare Anatomy, Chemist at Play, Sunscoop, and Vinci Botanicals. At the same time, Unilever Ventures deepened its backing of RAS Luxury Skincare, reinforcing a longer-running pattern of investment in India’s premium beauty ecosystem. Taken separately, the three moves reflect different strategic targets. Forest Essentials is heritage-led, retail-rooted, and culturally coded. Innovist is digital-first, science-forward, and built around a portfolio of fast-scaling brands. RAS represents a newer generation of premium Indian beauty brands marrying natural ingredients, efficacy, and omnichannel ambition. Together, they reveal something bigger: global beauty groups are no longer looking at India as a side bet. They are treating it as a market where future relevance, not just incremental growth, will be decided. That urgency is understandable. As North America cools, competition in China accelerates, and global growth becomes harder to find, India offers something few markets still do: scale, rising aspiration, and low prestige penetration, all at once. Yet, the country is not a blank canvas. It is a complex, layered beauty economy with deep regional variation, strong local players, and consumer expectations that cannot be met by simply importing a global playbook. Cindy Palusamy, founder of CP Strategy, a boutique advisory practice working across beauty, fashion, wellness, and hospitality, says, “India is a $30 billion-plus beauty market growing at high single to double digits, with prestige still underpenetrated versus China and the US. Growth is accelerating beyond metros into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, materially expanding the scale opportunity.” Not a default-win market What makes India attractive is also what makes it difficult. The market is large, but not uniform. It is digitally connected, but still heavily reliant on physical retail. Consumers are globally aware, yet deeply local in their needs, rituals, and purchase logic. Palusamy points out that the opportunity is not universally available. “The real question is: sustainable for whom?” she says. “Global brands will need to earn their place. This will not be a market where they win by default.” That warning matters. India may be underpenetrated in prestige, but underpenetration does not mean scant competition. The country is already crowded with international names, ambitious local founders, and fast-moving specialist brands. In that environment, presence alone is not an advantage. The winners are likely to be companies that can combine local relevance with long-term operational patience. That is why the current deal wave is less about simple expansion than capability buying. Multinationals are not just purchasing sales. They are buying access to founder ecosystems, consumer insight loops, local brand codes, retail intelligence, and the right to participate more credibly in a fast-evolving market. Forest Essentials and the value of cultural capital Estée Lauder’s move on Forest Essentials fits that logic. On one level, the acquisition is straightforward. Forest Essentials is one of India’s earliest premium beauty brands rooted in Ayurveda, with close to 200 stores, strong consumer recognition, and an established supply chain. It gives Estée Lauder greater exposure to a prestige segment that still has room to expand. But Palusamy argues that the deal delivers much more than revenue. “Estée Lauder’s acquisition of Forest Essentials goes well beyond revenue,” she says. “The brand holds a distinctive position in the Indian market as one of the earliest premium players rooted in Ayurveda, with much of its growth driven through its own retail network — providing direct, ongoing insight into consumer behavior.” That retail-led visibility matters. In a market as fragmented as India, direct access to how consumers shop, what they trade up for, and where prestige is really forming is invaluable. Forest Essentials gives Estée Lauder not just a brand, but an operating lens. Palusamy also points to the strategic value of linking heritage with emerging founder energy. “Paired with Estée Lauder’s investment in platforms like Beauty&You, which engage the next generation of founders, this creates a feedback loop between heritage and what’s emerging next,” she says. “The result is not just scale, but a more nuanced view of the Indian consumer — where they are spending, how they are evolving and what will shape the next phase of growth.” That framing is especially useful because it explains why legacy-rooted brands still matter in a market obsessed with newness. In India, cultural credibility can be as valuable as innovation velocity. Forest Essentials sits at the intersection of beauty, wellness, hospitality, and ritual — precisely the set of adjacencies global beauty groups increasingly want exposure to. Innovist and the local growth blueprint If Forest Essentials represents India’s premium heritage play, Innovist represents the newer local blueprint that multinational groups increasingly want to own rather than compete against. Founded in 2018 and restructured from Onesto Labs into Innovist in 2022, the company has built a multi-brand portfolio aimed at some of the fastest-growing corners of beauty and personal care: active skincare, sun care, and specialized haircare. Its science-led positioning, digital fluency, and multi-channel model make it highly relevant to a market where discovery often begins online but scale increasingly requires channel diversification. Its financial profile helps explain the interest. In FY25, Innovist reached revenue of 301 crore rupees ($37 million), up 182% year-on-year, and it turned profitable with net profit of roughly 12 crore rupees ($1.5 million). Just as important is its distribution mix: about a quarter of revenue comes from its own website, about a quarter from marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart, another quarter from quick-commerce platforms like Blinkit and Zepto, with the rest coming from offline channels. That balance is significant. It shows that India’s most attractive beauty businesses are no longer purely DTC stories. They are hybrid operating systems. They grow through digital acquisition, scale through marketplaces and quick commerce, and increasingly require offline presence to deepen trust and repeat purchase. For L’Oréal, Innovist would offer more than a fast-growing asset. It would provide a local template for how modern Indian beauty brands are built: ingredient-led, digitally marketed, portfolio-based, and channel agile. Unilever’s multiple-bets strategy If Estée Lauder is using acquisition to deepen prestige exposure and L’Oréal appears to be targeting high-growth local operating capability, Unilever has been building India in a different way: through sustained option-building. Palusamy sees Unilever Ventures’ backing of brands such as RAS Luxury Skincare as part of a broader deliberate strategy. “Unilever has been one of the most active strategic investors in India, backing multiple emerging brands across wellness, skincare, makeup, and fragrance,” she says. “In a market still early in its premium evolution, this reflects a deliberate strategy of placing multiple bets to identify which brands and founders will break through over the long term.” In that sense, these investments are doing double duty. “Along the way, these investments function as real-time insight engines, giving Unilever a sharper understanding of what resonates with consumers while simultaneously driving innovation across its broader portfolio,” she says. A Mumbai-based beauty market analyst, who requested anonymity because of her workplace, places RAS within a longer Indian context. The brand may be receiving fresh attention, but the broader pattern is not new. Unilever, the analyst says, has a long history of acquisitions and brand-building in India, from Lakmé and Indulekha to Lever Ayush and Minimalist, alongside investments in Plum and newer in-house brands like Acne Squad and Novology. That historical continuity is important because it reframes India not as a newly discovered frontier, but as a market global groups have been building toward for decades. RAS is one more sign that India’s premium and masstige segments are now mature enough to support increasingly differentiated bets. RAS itself is attractive for clear reasons. It combines natural positioning with scientific efficacy, vertical integration, strong margins, hotel-channel credibility, and omnichannel growth potential. Its “farm-to-face” model, female-led founding story, and early traction with high-end hospitality make the kind of brand that can sit inside both local premium and global wellness narratives. Execution risks are being underestimated For all the enthusiasm around India, the most grounded insights may be the least glamorous ones. According to the Mumbai-based analyst, the biggest risk for multinationals is not market entry but market misreading. Overestimating market size is the first trap. Many companies rely on simplistic equations around population, middle-class expansion, and income growth, then project beauty demand too broadly. But India does not operate as one seamless consumer market. Purchasing behavior differs sharply by region, religion, age, and life stage. What works in north India may not translate in the south. Uniform assumptions can destroy forecasts. The second risk is channels. “Eighty-five percent of beauty in India is still offline,” the analyst adds, spread across general trade, modern trade, e-commerce, and specialist retail. That means prestige scaling cannot be read through online excitement alone. Quick commerce may accelerate replenishment, but it is not a substitute for the trust, trial, and education needed to build prestige. The third risk is product adaptation. Heat, humidity, skin tone diversity, hyperpigmentation, pollution, and climate-specific wear all shape what succeeds. Global brands that fail to localize formulations or shade architecture often struggle, even when the brand itself is desirable. The fourth is underestimating mass beauty. India’s prestige story may be exciting, but a huge share of the market remains mass, vibrant, and highly competitive. Premiumization exists, but it will not happen evenly or all at once. Demand engines that will shape the next round of deals The analyst says the most value lies in identifying the structural demand engines likely to influence future M&A. Weddings and festivals are at the top of that list. India’s wedding economy, currently valued at about $130 billion, has become one of the country’s most powerful beauty consumption engines. Beauty demand no longer sits only around bridal makeup. It extends across months of skin preparation, haircare, wellness routines, trials, touch-ups, family purchasing, and post-event recovery. Roughly 30% of Indian beauty sales, the analyst says, happen in just 30 days of the year, heavily driven by weddings and festive periods. That makes these moments not seasonal spikes but structural buying cycles. For beauty strategists, that changes the logic of category planning. The opportunity is not just hero products, but regimens, kits, artist relationships, gifting formats, and ritual-adjacent positioning. Wellness is another key engine. Hydration, supplements, and adjacent categories are expanding quickly, creating white space for brands that sit between beauty, health, and lifestyle. Ayurveda-led clean beauty is a theme, though the analyst cautions that it is also overhyped and more crowded than international observers often assume. Finally, consolidation is coming. The analyst argues that Indian D2C beauty is critically low on true innovation, with too many brands copying Western formulas and too few building distinctive formulation capabilities. That suggests the next wave of deals may increasingly favor capability acquisition over simple scale. That may be the clearest lesson of all. India is becoming beauty’s most strategic deal market, but it is not rewarding generic ambition. It is rewarding specificity: the right founder, the right channel mix, the right cultural code, the right formulation logic, and the right timing. For global beauty groups, India is no longer a market to watch. It is a market to understand — and quickly.

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Dealmaking heats up as Estée Lauder, L’Oréal and Unilever target India growth