Welcome back, today is Friday, July thirty-first, and we start with Puig's half-year results, reported by WWD Beauty. Puig's second-quarter revenue came in at one point one four billion euros, up four point one percent like-for-like, according to Investing.com. That takes first-half sales to a record two point three five billion euros, up four point four percent, against a premium beauty market management estimates grew about four percent in the period. For a trade watching whether fragrance-led prestige is still carrying the European groups, that gap is the number to hold onto. Fragrance and Fashion, seventy-three percent of sales, generated one point seven billion euros and grew three point eight percent on that basis. Makeup rose nine point one percent, led by Charlotte Tilbury. Skincare grew two point three percent. By region, the same reporting has Asia Pacific up twenty point nine percent, with the Americas and EMEA each up two point six percent. Adjusted EBITDA reached four hundred sixty million euros, a nineteen point five percent margin, and the company reaffirmed its full-year guidance. That account puts reported net profit at two hundred sixty-three million euros, affected by one-off transaction-related costs. WWD Beauty credits fragrance and fashion, makeup and dermocosmetics for the period. This lands a week after our report, sourced to FashionUnited, that Puig had increased its stake in Charlotte Tilbury following unsuccessful integration talks with Estée Lauder. Commentary is thin, but a recurring lens reads the numbers as growth at two speeds, and treats them mainly as the first read-through since those talks ended. Also today, Johnson and Johnson has proposed what it describes as a comprehensive settlement to resolve the remaining United States ovarian talc litigation. Global Cosmetics News has that, and as with yesterday's ruling, we have not seen it matched elsewhere. Per that account, the proposal follows the federal court ruling we covered on plaintiffs' ability to prove that the company's talc products caused ovarian cancer, a ruling the same reporting characterises as favourable to the company. What has moved is the posture, not the outcome. This is an offer, not an approved resolution, and that reporting does not set out settlement terms, a participation threshold, or a date on which any of it would take effect. The allegations remain allegations. An endpoint here would travel well beyond one defendant, because talc has been the reference case for how the category prices ingredient liability and claim substantiation. Reaction in the trade leans toward discounting any headline figure once it is set against the number of claimants, with some arguing that per-claimant recovery after a decade of litigation costs is the more telling measure. Separately, L'Oréal's chief executive says the first Gucci beauty products under the group's new licence could arrive as early as twenty twenty-eight, Market Screener reports. Set against a licence that takes effect on the first of July, twenty twenty-seven, on the terms we covered when the agreement was signed this month, that puts most of the first year into the handover rather than into new product, and gives competitors a long, visible runway to plan against. That reporting does not give a launch line-up or say which categories come first. Industry reaction leans toward treating this as a licensing-execution story rather than a product one, with several practitioners pointing to a record of scaling acquired fragrance and beauty licences into global businesses, and framing the operational transfer, not the brand name, as what decides the outcome. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. Prada Beauty has signed Zendaya as ambassador for Prada Paradoxe, Cosmetics Business reports, fronting a new campaign for the L'Oréal-licensed brand alongside Tom Holland. Estée Lauder will launch Glimmer Eau de Parfum in August, per Premium Beauty News, an amber floral with gourmand accents and its first new fragrance since twenty twenty-one. WWD Beauty reports that Margaret Mitchell, formerly chief commercial officer at Space NK, joins Kiko Milano next month as EVP for North and Central Europe and global commercial strategy. Ulta Beauty is going after teen boys with its first masstige men's fragrance launch, according to Glossy. And finally, Ulta's products leave Target on the first of August, The US Sun reports, closing a shop-in-shop arrangement that has run in more than six hundred stores since August twenty twenty-one.