Two major beauty companies have been accused of being complicit in child labour, after an investigation found children were being used to select ingredients for luxury perfumes.
Jasmine suppliers Lancôme and Aerin Beauty allegedly hired young children in Egypt for as little as £1.18 a day to pick the flowers to use in three luxury products: Lancôme Idôle L’Intense and Ikat Jasmine and Limone Di Sicilia for Aerin Beauty, according to BBC.
A 100ml vial of Lancôme Idôle L’Intense retails for £125, while Ikat Jasmine costs £150 and Limone Di Sicilia for £160.
BBC reporters infiltrated jasmine farms across Egypt, which produces around half of the world’s jasmine, to film children doing backbreaking 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 at 3am every day to start picking jasmine flowers before let the sun damage them.
BBC reporters infiltrated jasmine farms across Egypt, which produces around half of the world’s jasmine, to film children doing backbreaking work to pick the precious flower.
Jasmine suppliers Lancôme and Aerin Beauty allegedly hired young children in Egypt for as little as £1.18 a day to pick the flowers and use them in three luxury products.
Heba said she needed the help of her four children, aged between five and 15, as they earn more money if they pick more flowers.
He said he works on land that belongs to someone else and therefore owes a third of his salary to the owner.
BBC reporters said they saw children under 15 picking jasmines in at least four different locations in the region.
Independent perfumer Christophe Laudamiel said the responsibility lies with the big beauty houses, also known as “the masters”, as they strictly control the industry surrounding the ingredients used in perfumes.
“The interest of the masters is to have the cheapest possible oil to put in the fragrance bottle” and then sell it at the highest possible price, said Laudamiel, who spent years working at one of the fragrance houses.
‘In reality, they do not govern the wages or salaries of the pickers, nor the real price of jasmine, because they are beyond that.
But the budgets set by beauty houses increased pressure to massively reduce pickers’ salaries.
BBC reporters said they saw children under 15 picking jasmines in at least four different locations in 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 at 3am every day to start picking jasmine flowers before let the sun damage them.
“There is a big disconnect between the value talked about in marketing talks and what is actually given to collectors,” he added.
UN special rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, told the BBC after his investigation.
‘On paper, they (the industry) promise a lot of good things, such as supply chain transparency and the fight against child labour. “Looking at these pictures, they’re not actually doing the things they promised to do.”
A spokesperson for Estée Lauder, the parent company of Aerin Beauty, told MailOnline:
‘We believe that the rights of all children should be protected and have contacted our suppliers to investigate this serious matter.
“We recognize the complex socioeconomic environment surrounding the local jasmine supply chain and are taking steps to achieve greater transparency and work to improve the livelihoods of supplier communities.”
A spokesperson for L’Oréal, Lancôme’s parent company, told MailOnline: ‘L’Oréal is deeply committed to respecting and protecting human rights and believes that child labor 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 autumn, after the last harvest and before the BBC contacted us.
‘Since then, we have been implementing concrete actions before the next harvest in June. 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 Labor Organization and other industry players.
“We are very disappointed that the BBC has decided not to include the concrete actions in Egypt that we started implementing before they contacted us and that we have actively shared with them.”
