L'Oréal hires restructuring counsel as US talc cases rise to about 760

L'Oréal has brought in restructuring advisers to look at options for a rising pile of US lawsuits over talc and other chemical ingredients in some of its cosmetics, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The Insurance Journal, relaying that report, said the company's US unit is working with restructuring counsel Weil, Gotshal and Manges and with the investment bank Ducera Partners. The lawsuits come from people who say the talc products made them ill. L'Oréal, Weil and Ducera did not immediately answer Reuters when asked for comment.

The company's own half-year report gives the count the advisers have been hired against. About 760 US proceedings over the alleged presence of asbestos particles in some talc-containing cosmetics were pending on 30 June, up from about 620 at the end of 2025. L'Oréal said it strongly contests the claims. A rise of about 140 cases in six months is the figure that turns a litigation docket into a restructuring question. The company has not said the cases have merit. It has said, in the Journal's account, enough by hiring these two firms for the docket to be treated as a liability that might be moved.

The option the Journal described is a separation. Tort liabilities would be placed in a distinct corporate entity, and that entity would be sold to an outside investor, so the operating business is no longer the defendant in the same way. The Journal said the advisers are looking at a sale outside Chapter 11, on the pattern of Honeywell's divestiture last year of certain asbestos liabilities to Delticus, a firm that buys corporate liabilities. A sale of that kind is not a bankruptcy. It is a contract in which a buyer takes the claims, and the price reflects the buyer's view of what the claims will cost.

Talc litigation is the precedent the market already knows. Johnson and Johnson has spent billions over more than a decade on claims that its talc products caused cancer, and it has tried more than once to put the liabilities in a bankruptcy. Other companies have looked at the same door. L'Oréal's reported path is the non-bankruptcy version: a sale to a liability buyer, rather than a filing. The difference for claimants is procedural. In a bankruptcy, a court supervises the pot. In a sale to a buyer like Delticus, the contract and the buyer's capital are the pot. The Journal did not say a sale had been agreed. It said the advisers were exploring one.

The half-year number is the anchor. 760 proceedings is not a verdict. It is a queue. Each case alleges asbestos particles in a talc cosmetic. Asbestos in cosmetic talc is the allegation that has driven the J&J docket, and it is the allegation L'Oréal says it contests. A company can contest every case and still decide that the tail risk belongs in a separate box. That is the decision the advisers have been asked to test. Ducera is the bank that would structure a sale. Weil is the firm that would build the entity and the transfer.

For L'Oréal the operating business is colour cosmetics, skincare and hair, sold globally, with the US a large profit pool. A liability that stays on the US unit's books sits next to that profit. A liability that has been sold sits with the buyer, and the price of the sale is a known cost instead of an open docket. The Journal's report is that the company wants the second arrangement. The company's report is that the docket grew from about 620 to about 760 in half a year, and that the claims are contested. Both can be true. Neither is a finding that any product contained asbestos.

The next public mark will be a filing or a deal announcement, or a denial. Until one of those arrives, the state of the story is the Journal's account of the mandate, the named advisers, the Honeywell-Delticus comparison, and the 760 cases in the half-year report. That is enough to say the docket has been taken out of the ordinary litigation column and put in front of restructuring counsel.