L’Oreal USA: Does Looks Really Matter in the Cosmetics Industry?
Taja Gregory
University of Mary Hardin Baylor

L’Oreal is a multimillion dollar cosmetics company; it is also associated with other brands such as Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani. L’Oreal is particularly interested in employees that are enthusiastic about fashion and beauty, posse’s customer service abilities just to name a few (O’Rourke, J. pg. 357). In Macy’s in San Jose, CA the manager Elysa Yanowitz was with the GM John Wiswall in the fall of 1997 when he saw an employee whom was middle eastern and not attractive to him or did not fit the body type that he would like to see working and representing L’Oreal and request that Mrs. Yanowitz get rid of her and hire someone more attractive or hot. When he returned a few weeks later he discovered that she was not fired as he had order to be done. He demanded to know why and Elysa stated that she could not fire her without probable cause, and she was one of the top selling employees there. Wiswall got upset and began to retaliate against Elysa by soliciting complaints and in the complaint they stated she maintained a dictorial style of leadership and was disliked by her subordinates (O’Rourke, J. pg. 355). He also went as far as to audit her expense reports and prepare memos about her performance. She was then told she was a liability and was making too many mistakes. Due to this it caused a lot of stress on Elysa and it began to affect her performance at work and her sales numbers slipped. After taking a medical leave she was replace.
The issues with this case to me is the fact that the GM was trying to get rid of an employee whom seem to be top sale person for the company because she was not attractive in his eyes which is clearly discrimination. Next he began to retaliate against the floor manager for not firing her. In the end she ending up being so stressed out from the retaliation efforts performed against her performance began to diminish and she ended up being replaced after being on medical leave for three months.
When I read that Elysa had filed a law suit against L’Oreal for sexual discrimination and retaliation, I thought that was the best thing for her to do maybe it will stop them from showing favoritism and discriminating against someone whom the company deem to not be attractive or “hot”. I went a read the actual case and