Research links child labor to luxury perfume brands, with young people as young as five found picking Egyptian jasmine used in Lancôme and Estée Lauder products

Two major beauty companies have been accused of complicity in child labor after investigations revealed children were used to choose ingredients for luxury perfumes.

Suppliers of jasmine for Lancôme and Aerin Beauty are said to have 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 . Unpleasant the BBC.

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

BBC reporters went undercover to jasmine farms across Egypt, where about half the world’s jasmine is produced, to film children doing grueling work picking the precious flower.

A woman from Gharbia, in the heart of Egypt’s jasmine region, told the BBC that she has to wake her family at 3am every day to pick jasmine flowers before the sun damages them.

Suppliers of jasmine for Lancôme and Aerin Beauty are said to have hired young children in Egypt for just £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 because they make more money when they pick more flowers.

She said she works on land owned by someone else and therefore 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 in the region.

Independent perfumer Christophe Laudamiel said the responsibility lay with the big beauty salons, known as ‘the masters’, because they strictly control the industry surrounding the ingredients used in perfumes.

“The interest of the masters is to put the cheapest possible oil in the fragrance bottle,” and then sell it at the highest possible price, said Laudamiel, who worked for years in one of the fragrance houses.

“They do not actually determine the salary or wages of the harvesters, nor the actual price of jasmine, because they are above that.

But the budgets imposed on beauty salons put pressure on massive cuts in pickers’ wages.

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

A woman from Gharbia, in the heart of Egypt’s jasmine region, told the BBC that she has to wake her family at 3am every day to pick jasmine flowers before the sun damages them.

“There is a big discrepancy between the value talked about in the marketing pitch 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 the investigation.

‘On paper they (the industry) promise so many good things, such as chain transparency and the fight against child labor. When you look at these images, they’re not really doing the things they said they were going 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 very serious matter.

“We recognize the complex socio-economic environment surrounding the local jasmine supply chain and we are taking action to achieve better transparency and work to improve the livelihoods of the 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 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 do 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 taken concrete actions ahead of the upcoming harvest in June. To drive systemic change to support local communities, we work with the Egyptian government, the Fair Labor Association, the International Labor Organization and other industry players.

“We are very disappointed that the BBC has chosen not to include the concrete actions in Egypt that we started implementing before they contacted us and which we actively shared with them.”