Good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome L'Oréal back to CAGNY. L'Oréal has one of the leading brand portfolios in global beauty, covering all facets of beauty, including color cosmetics, skin, hair, and fragrance, operating across the luxury, mass, dermatology, and professional channels. L'Oréal operates 40 global brands, which are sold in 150 countries, generating EUR 44 billion in sales. In 2025, the company delivered strong financial performance despite the volatile environment, adding to its long history of consistent organic sales growth, strong returns, and resilience across economic cycles. Today, we're pleased to be joined by CEO Nicolas Hieronimus, CFO Christophe Babule, and David Greenberg, chairman of L'Oréal US. Nicolas and David will share L'Oréal's strategy, priorities, and the planned path forward, with Christophe joining on stage, albeit not presenting. I'll turn it over to Nicolas. Thank you.
Thank you, Olivia. Good morning, everyone. Nice being back in CAGNY. It's, it's beauty time. So you've been seeing a few images of pets, of snacks, and this morning I will try to entertain you with a few beautiful images of beauty products and beautiful men and women on the screen. And as always, at L'Oréal, we like to start with a video that presents who we are so that we can go faster on the rest of the presentation. So welcome to the beauty world of L'Oréal. So you've seen what L'Oréal is.
As you know, we are the world leader in beauty and, by the way, have once again increased this leadership this year, EUR 44 billion in sales, EUR 6.4 billion in profit, 7 billion units sold around the world in 150 countries, 95,000 employees, and, around EUR 200 billion market cap. Today, with David Greenberg, we're going to show you how L'Oréal is not only performing, regardless of the, you know, the, the turbulences that affect the world, but how 2025 has been truly a defining year in, in the way we have transformed, in major aspects of the company to prepare for future growth and how we want to accelerate.
Clearly, this year has been a year of performance in a very particular context, you know, the geopolitical landscape, the tariffs and everything. That hasn't prevented L'Oréal from outperforming its market. The beauty market has grown around 3.5% with an acceleration on the second part of the year, where the second half of the year was more in the 4%-4.5% bracket, and we have accelerated at the same time and did overperform the market with a global growth at +4%. But what's really important is this acceleration, because if you look at our performance throughout the year, this is our numbers, adjusted of our IT invoicing transformation, 2.6%, 3.7%, 4.9%, and 5%.
You'll see later that if you put aside this little Travel Retail one-off in the fourth quarter, it's an even, even better growth. So it's an acceleration throughout the year that has been driven by a clear step-up in innovation. We have, of course, played a part in animating the market. The beauty market is an offer market. It's not a need-based market, so you have to tempt consumers with exciting products, and you just see here a small array of what we have put on the market in the second half of this year, and most of these products being great hits. So that's been one of the reasons why all our divisions have been growing.
The two biggest ones, mass market, so what we call consumer product, at +3.5, then luxury on a slightly slower market. Dermatological beauty, which has been for the past couple of years, our fastest-growing division, has truly accelerated on the second half. Professional product, which is our oldest division, but the fastest-growing one, has been growing at 7.5%. Three out of four of these divisions have been outperforming their respective channels. We've also been growing in all categories, albeit some more than others. The two stellar categories have been hair care and fragrances, both growing at double digits and where we are by far the global leaders and augmenting this leadership. Makeup has been a tale of two parts.
First part of the year, the market was slow, and the second part of the year, as we're gonna see later, we did accelerate the market and our own performance. Hair color is a bit of a slower category, and clearly, one area of underperformance in 2025, after eight years of continuous overperformance, has been skincare, which has been clearly the focus of the end of the year and the beginning of this one. All categories are growing, all regions are growing. Europe, our, you know, homeland is growing at +4%. North America, you'll hear from David Greenberg, the Chairman of L'Oréal USA, in a minute, has been not only doing a good year, but an accelerating year all over, one quarter after another. North Asia, we'll talk about it in a minute, it's been turned back to positive.
And emerging markets are close to +10%, with our two regions, Southeast Asia and Middle East, one at +11% and Latin America at +8%. Slight slowdown in the first quarter, but overall, emerging markets are a major driver of our growth. They are 17% of our sales. We are probably one of the consumer groups where emerging markets have a slowest weight because the distribution and the purchasing power weren't ripe for our brands. But now it's clearly accelerating, and it represents 40% of our growth. But probably the two most important factors in this year's performance was the acceleration of our two biggest, outside of Europe, our two biggest regions.
One was the U.S.A., a clear acceleration, +2% in the first half, +4% in the second half, and a good start of the year says that the U.S. beauty in the U.S. and L'Oréal in beauty in the U.S. is really in acceleration mode. The same thing has happened in China, where we have truly accelerated, even though, as we'll see in a minute, Travel Retail has kind of offset this performance in the fourth quarter. Because if I take mainland China, our first half was at +1%, and the second one at +5%. That's a very important story for us because we see that the market has turned back to positive. Even though it's a small positive, it is positive, and we have been accelerating and increasing our market share in China.
Again, there, even though we have to wait for the end of Chinese New Year, the start of the year is pretty good. On the other hand, Travel Retail, which was progressively, as you see in our sellouts, improving on a market that has been resetting for a couple of years now. There was a fourth quarter disruption with in mainland China, where one of the apps was closed and were forced to change owners, and they stopped selling. So we decided to you know reduce the inventory and to stop shipping or reduce shipping very strongly in the Q4 so that we start 2026 on a good basis for Travel Retail.
But overall, the good news in North Asia is really good, and our L'Oréal Luxe division has taken the global leadership in North Asia for the first time. It was the only region when they weren't leader, and it's very promising for the future. So, if you look at this growth, excluding travel retail, Asia actually 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%. So that's why I'm pretty bullish about 2026, because you see a good trend of acceleration for L'Oréal, which allows us to invest behind our brands and to continue to recruit new consumers. This is a lot empowered by e-commerce. E-commerce today, for L'Oréal, is 30% of our sales. Just a decade ago, it was barely 5%, growing 13%, so continuing to gain share.
And of course, it's a massive tool of penetration, particularly in emerging markets where our products are not totally fit for small mom-and-pop stores across the country. So the rise of e-commerce in every emerging regions, as in China, U.S., and Europe, is a massive growth engine for L'Oréal, and as it's accretive, it's a very, you know, favorable growth engine for the company. When we look at that, therefore, we have had a pretty strong P&L.
You know, despite the 30 basis points of tariff hits, we've improved our gross margin to a record high of 74.3%, maintain our A&Ps at EUR 14 billion, reduce the weight of our sales general administrative expenses to 18.8%, and therefore being able to once again deliver a 20 basis points improvement in operating margin despite the 40 basis points tariff hits at the global level. So a very well-managed P&L, thanks to my great CFO, Christophe Babule, and his teams. And that allows us to continue to give stronger and stronger dividends to our shareholders.
So we will be proposing at the AGM in April an increase of the dividend from EUR 7 to EUR 7.20, which is a growth of +2.9%, and a distribution of around 56%, and of course, with a loyalty bonus of 10%. So we want to remain that company that consistently delivers profit improvements, operating margin improvements, and dividend improvements for our shareholders.
But in the end, the performance of 2025, as I said, should not, for the financial performance, should not, dismiss the fact that we continue to want to be a sustainability leader, to want to be an ethical leader, and we have been receiving multiple accolades, including the 10th consecutive year, AA A from CDP, and we are the only company in the world, all categories included, that have this type of recognition. And that remains a very important part for L'Oréal because we want to be a financially effective company, but also contribute to the world and to sustainability. But 2025 was truly, for us, a year of transformation. We've really been investing into making this company both fitter for the future, but also ready to accelerate.
We have invested the record amounts in tech, in AI, in R&D, what we call R&I, and of course, in acquisitions, and I'm going to share some of these investments for you in a minute. The first one is in tech. It's a record year in investment in tech, EUR 1.5 billion invested in technology, and that goes from building the IT backbone, the ERP of our company, which has some impact sometimes on the legibility of our quarterly sales, but is very important because it is the first and necessary step for us to be able to truly leverage the scale of L'Oréal while keeping agility and speed. It is the base for our AI development. Clearly, AI is at the core of what we work on at L'Oréal, and it touches every part of the organization.
We are developing strong use cases with value that we are measuring, both for consumer journeys, so AI-powered consumer journeys is about, you know, giving consumers possibility to have the best possible choice amongst the millions of products that are available out there. We are powering our functions at different level with AI, and of course, we empower our own employees with AI and the use of L'Oréal GPT. Just a few examples, if I take the AI, the augmented consumer journey, we have this Beauty Genius in the U.S. where you can have tailor-made recommendations powered by AI on L'Oréal Paris, and it's got already 1 million interactions.
But also, we've invested in a small startup, which is a multi-brand AI-powered recommendation engine called Noli, and it's really getting a lot of positive feedback from consumers. We are using AI to augment the efficacy of our pool of our A&P. That's our famous BETiq proprietary tool that allows us to optimize our spending and to generate 10%-15% productivity on the first year in any country. And now it's being rolled out to 10 countries, and more than half of our A&Ps are going to be covered.
So it's truly something that allows us to maintain control, the percentage of A&P in our P&L and potentially to reduce it, because we are truly seeing the benefit in a more fragmented than ever media landscape and promotional landscape for our teams to be able to allocate the monies in the most efficient way. Of course, AI augments creativity. You see a few images here that come from our CREAITECH studio, where we create around 500,000 pieces of content a month, and our teams do it at a much cheaper, faster, efficient, and in the end, more creative way, because there are no limits to what can be done. And that's a fantastic way to augment our contacts with consumers whilst creating the aesthetic that beauty requires, and of course, the specificities of each brand.
There is AI for our functions, and the example I choose is clearly R&I, R&D. We have signed this partnership with IBM, where we mix our own data, which is very unique and massive in terms of beauty expertise, with their computing power, to augment the number of molecules and formulas that we can create, that we can test, that we can assess by very important multiplying factors. So that's really allowing us to be even stronger in terms of innovation, which is the engine, the nerve of this market. That's why, if I look at this year, it has been a record year in terms of innovation.
Our rate of launches has increased by 150 basis points versus last year, and that's a decision that we took very late in 2024. So our capacity to accelerate and to bring to the market more innovations, more initiatives, has been powered by AI and has been powered by the reactivity of our research team. And it's just the beginning because we can continue and will continue to do more. As illustrated by the number of patents that have been filed by L'Oréal in 2025, 725 patents for the single year of 2025. It's our record, and it probably makes us one, if not one of the most innovative companies in terms of patents in Europe and the world.
And actually, and that's a great source of pride for me and for all the L'Oréal employees. In 2025, L'Oréal has been named Europe's most innovative company by Fortune Magazine across all sectors, whether tech, automobile, weaponry, airplanes. And that's something we are very, very proud of, because in the end, and I say it again, beauty is an offer market. You don't innovate, you don't grow. You don't bring superior products to the consumer that they are willing to pay a bit more for, you don't get the growth, you don't get the growth margin, and that's what we are fighting for, and that's what we've been delivering this year. And of course, it's been a record year in terms of acquisitions.
After Dr. G, a Korean brand last year, we've signed the license for Jacquemus, a fashion brand. We have bought two indie brands with pretty interesting technologies, Medik8, a U.K. skincare brand, and Color Wow, an American styling brand. We've, of course, and that's the biggest deal in the L'Oréal history of L'Oréal acquisition, acquired, and we are finalizing the deal as we speak. We have acquired Kering Beauty, so all the beauty licenses or brands that Kering has. So full acquisition of Creed, which is a high-end fragrance brand, and the long-term licenses of Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and when available, of the Gucci fashion. So that will clearly augment in a major way, our luxury leadership. And finally, it's not an acquisition, it's a participation. We've raised our stake into Galderma from 10% to 20%.
Galderma is a leading company in aesthetics and dermatology, and of course, this is very interesting to us as aesthetics are a growing phenomenon and a clear, and complementary adjacency to, I would say, traditional cosmetic beauty. So major, major year in acquisitions. And today, when I look at the portfolio of the L'Oréal brands, there's a lot. There's 40 brands, international brands, and, most people don't even know that they belong to L'Oréal. But what's important is that this brand portfolio, which here are classified, you know, on the two big axes of beauty, health on the one hand, glamour on the other one, and then with different price points, we see that we cover pretty much, all price points and beauty positioning.
Of course, we like to spend a bit higher, so we are more on the upper side on the chart than on the bottom one, but we clearly cover everybody, and that's a great reason to be ambitious in terms of acceleration. All the more, as beyond the brands we have in our traditional playground, we have been investing into opening new growth opportunities. Part of our Kering deal is a partnership on longevity, which remains to be worked on, and you may have some questions about it. We'll be, you know, building on the trend for this hospitality of where high net worth individuals go to have some experiences to live longer, better.
Of course, there is the Galderma participation, which goes along with the scientific partnership that will increase, again, the level of innovation and differentiation of our brands. That's why I feel that after 2025, L'Oréal is stronger than ever. We are really ready to accelerate, and I will show you why we will accelerate our growth, because the market will do better and because we have a very powerful strategy to overperform that market. The market will do better because, first of all, there'll be more consumers. There is 2 billion consumers that we aim to target over the decade, but the reality is that you have emerging middle classes that are 400 million more people entering middle classes that will be able to afford beauty. You've got consumers that are younger and younger entering the market.
125 million more people, less than 25 million. I've actually been told that one of our investors had brought his kids to this presentation. I don't know if Talia and Tess are here, but I'm sure they'll be one day consumers of L'Oréal products, and I hope they will enjoy this presentation. Finally, we have people living longer, and that's a blessing for the beauty industry. We're not one of these categories that get worries about people living longer. On the contrary, you have people and women and men over 60 that are gonna be 170 million more, mostly in the mature markets, and they use a lot of beauty products. So beauty market will increase. There are lots of trends that are making this market grow.
E-commerce continue to accelerate and facilitate penetration. Price ladders are stretching, so if you have the capacity, as you saw in our portfolio, to offer products from very cheap to very high, you can cover everybody. Beauty routines are truly sophisticating because you see that on social networks, on TikTok, on Instagram. Influencers are sharing all their beauty recipes. And by the way, this health obsession and this longevity obsession leads to augmentation of beauty routines and protocols. And finally, diversity is creating a lot of new needs. It's true in hair. You have much more curly and coiled hair and skin. You've got much more different shades of skin, and climate has an impact on it, and that's creating the growth of the beauty market.
L'Oréal is really ready to surf on this trend because what we do is that we use all these brands we have, this, this division, these four divisions that might be strange to some of you, are actually allowing us to make sure that we don't lose one consumer and not lose one trend. We've been doing this across all our categories. If I take haircare, this is the market that has been sophisticating the most and actually taking the prices up, so it makes it now a, I would say, a profitable category. We've really been tackling it through our all multiple divisions, outperforming it by 2.5 x over the last six years. That's been one of our biggest and strongest growth engine.
And as you can see, this is an example of how we address a market with multiple brands and divisions. You've got Kérastase and the Professional Products Division on the high end that are really growing at twice their historic average, and you saw that the Professional Products Division was the fastest-growing one. You've got mass market that has the third consecutive year at double-digit. That's, you know, addressing whether curls or frizz or anybody at all price points. And now you've got the Dermatological Beauty Division because there's lots of scalp issues, hair fall, dandruff that is contributing a lot to the growth. And here you can really see how we occupy the markets with multiple divisions. Of course, we'll continue to innovate many launches plans in 2026 for us to continue to lead in haircare.
Then, we didn't have a big strength in styling. That was probably the only gap in our portfolio, which is why we made this acquisition of Color Wow, great American brands. And number one in this category, and just, you know, in its infancy as it relates to its globalization. So we are just beginning to make this brand global and hopefully, and not hopefully, I know it's going to be a great success because wherever we launch it, consumers are reacting extremely well. Another category where we've been growing, as you saw, double digits, is fragrance, where we've truly been building a real powerhouse. We have benefited from the love of fragrance that has developed amongst young consumers who want to have several fragrances. It's what we call the wardrobe effect.
You have people across the globe that weren't using fragrance, like in Asia, that are falling in love with this category, and the Middle East continues to develop it. You have all these expectations, which we have been able to seize, and we have become the global leader in luxury fragrance, with spectacular performance on women, where we have the top three feminine fragrances in Europe. And I just heard that Libre fragrance from YSL, which is number one in Europe, is now also number one in the world, which ahead of Chanel, which was a great thing for us to achieve. And we are really making strong strides with men, both with Yves Saint Laurent or recently Prada. So fragrance will continue to be a very strong growth engine. We have great couture success stories.
All our brands have been growing very, very strongly on couture fragrances, which is why the Kering deal is such a big opportunity, you know. Of course, we have Jacquemus, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Gucci are massive growth opportunities for us. When you realize that YSL Yves Saint Laurent is bigger today in beauty than it is in fashion, and if you know or Google the size of Gucci fashion, you can imagine what we could do with Gucci Beauty. So it's a massive opportunity for us, and we will continue to grow. We will cover the market again at all price points with mists at a very affordable price, and haute parfumerie fragrances such as Creed or Aesop that we acquired a year ago. In makeup, it's all about speed and creativity.
So we've increased our pace of, of launches, and you can see that even when the market is slow, because it's an offer market, the leader can make the trend. And CPD brands, our mass market brands, have been generating the whole of the acceleration in the U.S. markets, on the second half and increase their, their market share with a combination of L'Oréal Paris, NYX and Maybelline at different price points. So we do bring more launches, more innovation, whether on couture or on mass market. And of course, it's about innovations, but it's also and there will be a lot in 2026, but it's also about activation.
And the way we work now with our teams in the U.S., and David will tell you, if I leave him some time, a little bit about it, it's how we partner with the big shows of the moment, the big stars of the moment, and implant our product in shows that the younger generations are seeing and that they find ultimately relevant. And if any of you, I'm not one, but is a fan of Emily in Paris, and if you watched the last season, there was one full episode where L'Oréal Paris brand was at the core of the plot, where the agency was supposed to create an ad for our new lipstick, which of course, is creating a strong connection with our consumers. This is also what beauty and creativity are about.
Finally, there's skincare, which, as I said, has been our a pain point this year, but it's also where I have the biggest ambition, because this is where this quest for health and longevity and our pioneering the science of longevity will make the biggest difference. We've had very strong track record in skincare, growing eight years, not this year, and really we've upped our game in the second part of the year with more innovation, and that has shown in our Dermatological Beauty Division performance, which has clearly benefited from new launches on the second part of the year. And it shows, again, if you have the right playbook, if you adapt your engagement strategies and have better new products, you can accelerate again. We have had lots of victories and CeraVe turnarounds. SkinCeuticals, our aesthetics brand, has become billionaire in Europe.
That's joined our roster of billionaire brand, and Vichy, that some of you may know, it has rebounded. But more importantly, this portfolio that we have allows us to cover every, price points, you know, from EUR 3, cream, Toque Seco, in Brazil, where I'm going tomorrow, to the EUR 450 Helena Rubinstein, that's, treasured by Chinese consumers. You have to have skincare for everyone, and that's what we have at L'Oréal. So we recruit new consumers in emerging markets, and of course, we accompany, consumers in aging, in their aging journeys in the mature world. That's why our acquisitions matter. Dr. G, a Korean beauty brand. K-beauty is hot. We have bought one, and Medik8, which is science-driven luxury, will allow us to accelerate in skincare around the world. But finally, on skincare, it's truly, an opportunity.
I'll skip the, the body attack because, we don't have a lot of time, but it's really that this longevity quest is really making people expand their beauty routines and their protocols. They want diagnosis that allow us to know what they truly need. They will use topicals like the one we're launching with, Lancôme Absolue . They will- they are using devices, LED masks, like the one we presented at the CES in Vegas, and supplements. And all these, extended protocols offer growth opportunity for L'Oréal because we are playing and will be playing in each and every one of them. Thanks to our science, we have groundbreaking molecules in the pipeline from our advanced research. We are one of the only two beauty companies that has its own advanced research.
With partners from our, our ecosystem and tomorrow with the partnership of Galderma. So as you can see, we are stronger than ever. We feel stronger than ever. We want to accelerate because we're seeing the beauty market is showing more and more dynamism. We want to outperform it. We have a lot of innovation in the pipeline, and we have this multi-division strategy that I have tried to outline for you, which makes us very confident that the future of beauty will be bright because it's expanding to these new adjacent territories that I was talking about, technologies, categories or services.
And because we have the teams, we have the means, we have the science, we have the resources to invest behind this science, and that's what makes us very confident that we will continue to win across categories, across channels, and across regions. And because we are here in the U.S.A., I accelerated a little bit my presentation to make sure I leave time to David Greenberg, who's the Chairman of L'Oréal USA, and who will give you some news of this beautiful market, which happened to be our biggest one. Thank you. Alex?
Thank you, Nicolas, and good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. Of course, you know perfectly well that L'Oréal has been in the U.S. for some time, but we haven't taken this opportunity to really share it with you directly, and I thought this was the perfect moment. Just a couple of years ago, we celebrated 70 years in the U.S., and it's an extraordinary history. Personally, I've been a part of it for over 30 of them, and I can say the spirit of our company in the U.S. is a spirit of entrepreneurship and a spirit of challenger, which is interesting because we're the global leading company, but we start from very humble beginnings.
And, while today we're the number one subsidiary in the group, we're about 27% of the turnover of the group, we're also very-- we've built an ecosystem over these years that has made us very self-sufficient in many ways. We produce over three-quarters of everything that we sell in our market locally in our zone, thanks to six factories, and an enormous footprint of retail stores as well, which is very unique for our business because we have a direct connection with our consumers across brands like Kiehl's, Aesop, and even in professional beauty, where in the Professional Products Division, we connect directly with over 1 million stylists through our SalonCentric distributor, which operates both stores, e-commerce, of course, and direct sales. And an amazing team in the U.S. of over 13,000 of us.
You don't see charts like this often, but I love this chart, not because the first bar is more or less the year I started, but because with the exception of two moments in the last decades, which were the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and, of course, the pandemic, we've had consistent growth in the U.S. market for all of these years. We surpassed EUR 10 billion in 2023 and close to EUR 12 billion in this most recent year. So we're a very scaled subsidiary in a very dynamic market, and I hope if you leave here with nothing else today, is the fact that we consider this market to be a very high potential growth market for years to come. Why can we continue to succeed in this market?
It has a lot to do with the way we built our conquest, our foundation in the U.S. over these years. With the acquisition of Maybelline some years ago, we put ourselves firmly planted in the mass makeup market with a brand that was very deeply penetrated in the market, which then allowed us to ignite our sales across multiple brands. We added more later. In Pro Hair, where we started very small, we acquired the number-one and the number-four brand at that time. Now we own number-one and the number-two brands, in addition to some of the new brands coming on board, and we've built the SalonCentric network over these years through acquisition and through organic growth to give us those direct connections with our customers.
We identified the indie makeup phenomenon many years ago, and in fact, we acquired the OG of indie makeup with Urban Decay in 2012, and then more in the digital era, in the social media era, with NYX Professional Makeup, which so far this year seems to be off to a fantastic start. I think we're the fastest-growing cosmetics brand in the mass market year to date, 2026. And finally, accessible dermatology. You know, we've seen this phenomenal surge of consumers interested in self-care and taking care of themselves, and their skin is, of course, emblematic of health.
With the acquisition of CeraVe, which by now you know a lot about, but you know, from under $100 million in sales to, well over $1.5 billion in a very short period of time, it's been extraordinary success, not just in the U.S., but, but globally. We continue to optimize our couture business as well. Nicolas shared a lot about that with you. I won't go into it deeply, other than to say that thanks to this connection with culture and this connection with celebrity, and this connection with sport, and this connection with social media, these brands have become loved by Gen Z and even Gen Alpha, which gives us enormous potential to continue to grow these brands in the future. The aesthetics trend.
You know, I think we're all keenly aware of our population, of not just the affluence and the age, but the fact that more and more is available to us. Over 20% of people are on GLP-1s. A quarter of women over the age of 45 are—have done or are contemplating some kind of aesthetic procedure. So this segment is a powerful segment of growth, of profitability and of connection, because we're in fact present in over half of all dermatologist offices in this country, and in addition, over 85% of all med spas. So these brands, like SkinBetter Science and SkinCeuticals, are the brands of choice for the professional world.
Finally, where beauty, wellness comes together, experience, fragrance, care, and this combination of efficacious as well as pleasurable, is an enormous explosion in our country and in the world, frankly. With the acquisition of Youth To The People, in addition to Aesop, these are brands that are firmly implanted in these places. We are the number one beauty company in the U.S., somewhere around 13% share. So lots of upside, plenty of room to continue to grow, two times the size of the number two. And I think you got from Nicolas's presentation that what this provides us is the resources and the ability to amplify from the position that we're starting in. We're number one across all of our divisions and pretty well balanced as well. In categories, it's the same.
You know, our weight of business by category, you can see here, hair is the biggest at 31%, followed by skin, then makeup, 26%, and fragrance at 13%. We know the fragrance story has been a powerful engine of growth. We're pretty much aligned with the market everywhere. However, in skincare, we have a lot of upside, where skincare is 37% of the U.S. market, and we're only at 30%. We have the brands, we have the technology, and we have the innovation. We also have the top-ranking brands. Why is this important? We play the pricing, of course, but we can also play very carefully consumer segmentation. We don't have to be all things to all people with every brand.
In makeup, we occupy the number one, three, and with NYX, we're just outside of the top five, but one of the fastest-growing. Top three in hair, in skincare, with CeraVe, number one, La Roche-Posay is now in number three, and SkinCeuticals is number four. So these brands are big and powerful brands in this market. And this year, and just recently, this is new data, that YSL has taken over the number one fragrance position in the U.S. market, which is an extraordinary achievement over many years of innovation, excitement, and building connections with consumers. To see that happen is quite phenomenal. And then up-and-comers that are quickly becoming top five, like Valentino. Soon, we're going to see Prada there and many more.
The market, as we know, is a big market, somewhere around EUR 74 billion, growing at 4%. So we know this market is critical to the success of the group, and we know, of course, that it has a vitality, thanks to the economic engine of the U.S. We're often asked whether or not this market has continued growth potential, and you heard it from Nicolas. I mean, this is a market that's an offer-driven market, so that the more we put into it, of course, the more we stimulate the growth of the market. Historically, there was a CAGR of around 4%. When you take out the periods, you know, of the pandemic and then the pandemic recovery, we also saw most recent years, somewhere around 4%.
Frankly, I'm a firm believer that this will be the baseline, and it could even be a little bit better than this. Why? Because these are still preferred categories. So this is data from Circana, but what it says, when you compare us to a number of other categories, we are a preferred category. Therefore, we're one of the fastest-growing categories, with the exception, it looks like, of toys and video games. So what can we say? Pretty much everything else is in low growth, and it's both value and volume, which is important because it's more consumers and more usage opportunities. And in the U.S., we're gaining momentum, and we outperform the market in every one of our divisions, by considerable margin, and you can see that on this chart.
This demonstrates that our innovation is working and our marketing engine is working. Of course, we're not starting from a base of zero here. This is a very exciting results to see and to share with you, and we see it continuing into this year. Why is this market so important to us and so important to the group? You know, diversity, you're well aware of it, but what matters the most is that each generation has a unique contribution to make to the beauty business and, of course, to our business and to our brands. From Gen Z, that loves so many of our brands, both fragrance, skincare, and makeup, all the way to men, who today are comprising only 10% of beauty business and have so much more room to go.
We've seen what has happened in men's fragrance and now even in skincare. The boomers, of course, so much potential, especially as science and technology brings more options for them. Today, it's incredible, 40% of the beauty spend is driven by millennials and younger, and almost half of those consumers are now diverse in some way: skin, melanated skin, hair texture, and they're looking for different kinds of products, and they're embracing the brands that we have in our portfolio that bring that kind of innovation. Almost a third of the spend comes from the affluent consumer, who comprises less than 10% of the U.S. population. These consumers are not just trying things, but they're very ambitious and aggressive in the kinds of things that they want to do, especially in skincare and in haircare.
This 55+ age consumer not only are they populous and not only do they have the disposable income to spend, but they're interested to know what they can do to improve the way they look, the way they feel, and it's intrinsically linked to self-confidence and to longevity. Of course, this is an enormous potential for us over the years to come and a great dynamic. You can see here we have some brands that are particularly dialed into each one of these segments. Brands like Redken and NYX on Gen Z, or Urban Decay and Maybelline on the millennial, or Lancôme and L'Oréal Paris for the boomer. For men, of course, brands like Kiehl's and Yves Saint Laurent.
So very much connecting these brands to these consumer targets to allow us to deepen the penetration, continue to recruit, and bring new offers to these markets. Things that you've seen, powerful innovations and successes over these years, like the new YSL Blush, which was the must-have item for millennials, or Ralph's Club, which was the launch we did with Usher under the Ralph Lauren brand last year, or P-TIOX , which is your companion to Botox or in some cases, your replacement for Botox. So all of these brands, very dialed into these consumers, and of course, at all price points, from where we play an under-$15 brand on TikTok Shop, all the way through to the most expensive products, be it at Sephora or Macy's, Ulta, or anywhere else.
Building this connection is what makes the difference for us, and we are, of course, at our heart, a marketing company obsessed by the consumer. But this has changed from the analog world to the digital world, from the cookie world to the individual ID world, and now in agentic commerce and AI. But it all starts with three things. First is rapidity of movement, understanding culture, and being connected. Second is being creative, and third is scaling. And in order to scale, of course, you need to build enormous reach in a very authentic way. So, I'm going to play you some examples of some of the things we've done recently, and I hope you enjoy them.
I don't understand how one person needs this much makeup. Remember these? I think you do. Oh, my God! I totally remember this thing. This is the highlight of my college experience. In partnership with CeraVe. I love CeraVe. It's CeraVe. I got us a meeting. We're meeting tomorrow to pitch ideas for Infallible lipstick from L'Oréal, Johnny. Oh, my God, that's huge! Follow me. Everybody wants to be us. We got L'Oréal! Oh, my God. I'm out.
So I'm going to finish on the topic of our go-to-market. With all of this excitement, of course, we have to be where the consumer is, and we've seen this enormous shift to e-commerce. We're also outpacing the e-commerce market. So overall, we grew at 14% versus the market at 6% in e-commerce. And of course, you have to play all of your e-commerce partners. We perform pretty well across most of them. We have the number one position on all of our e-commerce partners, from Amazon to Sephora, with the exception of Walmart, where I think it'll happen pretty soon. How do we do this?
We do this by being very linked to content, to how consumers make choices, and to provide the kind of data, the kind of content, and the kind of information that helps them make the right choice. With partnerships with ChatGPT, where we load our own data directly into ChatGPT so that they don't have to scrape, and we can make sure that it's the kind of data the consumer is looking for, and partnerships with Target and Amazon on those same kinds of topics. We never forget about brick-and-mortar. It's still where we showcase our brands in the most powerful way. And importantly, and I think you've probably understood that from this week and everything else that's going on, most of our retail partners are investing in beauty. They've understood that beauty is the future of their, of their business.
It's where the consumers are most engaged, it's higher margin, and it also showcases what they do in a more powerful way. So with that, lots more consumers, lots more connection with those consumers, lots more conversion to our L'Oréal brands and products, and lots more growth in the U.S. So with that, I thank you all for listening, for being here, and I think we're probably taking questions, I'm guessing, in the next room.
Let's thank L'Oréal for the presentation. Appreciate it, guys.