Who Owns Lakmé?

Lakmé was founded in 1952 as a subsidiary of Tata Oil Mills, making it India's first domestically produced cosmetics brand. The founding story is unusual. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was concerned that Indian women were spending scarce foreign exchange on imported makeup and personally asked industrialist J.R.D. Tata to create an Indian alternative. Tata agreed, and the brand was named after the French opera Lakmé, itself named for the Hindu goddess Lakshmi.

Simone Tata, the French-born wife of naval officer and businessman Naval Tata, joined the company in the early 1960s and became chairperson in 1982. She shaped the brand's identity for more than three decades, turning it from a small lipstick and powder line into India's best-known color cosmetics name. Simone Tata died on December 5, 2025, at the age of 95, prompting a wave of retrospectives on the brand's origins in the Indian press.

Through the 1970s and 1980s Lakmé expanded into skincare, fragrance, and salon services. In 1985 the Tata group incorporated Tata's Lakmé Limited as a standalone cosmetics company. A decade later, in 1996, Tata formed the 50:50 Lakmé Unilever joint venture with Hindustan Lever to combine Tata's brand equity with Unilever's distribution. The partnership lasted two years. In 1998 Tata sold its entire stake to Hindustan Lever for approximately ₹200 crore, and Lakmé became a full Unilever brand.

Under Hindustan Unilever the brand widened well beyond its original range. It launched Lakmé Absolute as a premium makeup line, introduced mass-market hits such as the Eyeconic kajal range, and built a large salon business. Lakmé salons, operated through the HUL subsidiary Lakmé Lever Private Limited, passed 460 locations across India by the early 2020s, with the company opening new salons at a reported pace of roughly two per week. In 2000 Lakmé co-founded Lakmé Fashion Week with IMG Reliance, an event that became India's most prominent fashion platform and gave the brand deep ties to the country's designer industry.

In 2025 Hindustan Unilever continued to use Lakmé for new category entries, including sun-care products launched under the Lakmé and Vaseline brands. The brand remains one of the anchors of HUL's Beauty and Wellbeing portfolio alongside Glow and Lovely, Pond's, and the acquired direct-to-consumer label Minimalist.