Welcome in, today is Monday, August thirty-first, and we begin with Estée Lauder, where Yahoo Finance reports guidance has landed above Wall Street's estimates. Estée Lauder guided fiscal twenty twenty-seven adjusted earnings to between three dollars ten and three dollars thirty-five a share, ahead of analyst estimates, per Yahoo Finance. That reporting puts fourth-quarter net sales up six point three percent at three point six three billion dollars, and shares up eleven percent in premarket trading on August nineteenth. Luxury fragrance carried it, with Le Labo and Tom Ford driving ten percent category growth, and the same account reports real sales growth in mainland China. Makeup was flat and hair care fell one percent, with chief executive Stéphane de La Faverie saying the company is not happy with either. The quarter still held a one hundred sixteen million dollar net loss, narrowed from five hundred forty-six million a year earlier. Whether the recovery broadens past scent and skin is the open question for brand teams. Some in the trade read the China figures as prestige beauty recovering ahead of luxury fashion. Also today, Kohl's reported Sephora shop-in-shop sales down about four percent, after a low-single-digit decline in the first quarter. That is per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which reports chief executive Michael Bender attributing the slide to a handful of major brands winning expanded distribution, leaving shoppers other places to buy what Kohl's once held exclusively. The same account says newer brands arriving through Sephora are not yet large enough to offset that, and that Bender expects the softer performance to persist until they reach scale. For a partnership Kohl's once called its crown jewel, built across hundreds of stores at the cost of its jewelry floor, that reads straight through to the economics of renting a beauty destination rather than building one. Industry reaction tends to read the decline as a distribution problem more than a Sephora one, with a contrarian thread questioning the outsourced model itself. Separately, K-beauty is moving onto mainstream American shelves. The Chosun Ilbo reports Target will run its Target Beauty Studio in more than six hundred stores from September tenth, carrying sixteen hundred products from ninety brands, over two-thirds of them new to Target, with K-beauty broken out as its own section. That reporting also has CJ Olive Young opening a K-beauty Edit in five hundred eighty Sephora doors, about eighty-seven percent of the chain's U.S. fleet. The pull, per that account, is that offline is roughly seventy percent of U.S. cosmetics sales while seventy-six percent of K-beauty's North American sales still run through e-commerce. That reporting attributes the recruiting to Amazon and TikTok traction marking these as verified emerging brands with lower entry risk, and cites APR's Medicube, now in about three thousand Walmart stores. Industry reaction leans toward framing the push as a curation question more than a shelf-space one. Following our earlier report on Regent's move for Avon North America, Premium Beauty News reports the firm has acquired that business from South Korean conglomerate LG Household and Health Care, consolidating Avon's operations under a single leadership team. New in that account is the seller and the single leadership structure, alongside its framing of this as the first time Avon North America and Avon International have sat under one owner since two thousand sixteen. For anyone selling into or alongside Avon, the practical change is who now sets sourcing and direct-selling terms across both halves. Industry reaction leans celebratory, much of it from former employees and long-tenured sellers, though a quieter thread cautions that reviving an iconic brand is execution-dependent work and that the direct-selling channel is diminished from its heyday. Now, a few more headlines moving the trade today. WWD Beauty reports Kayali, ranked Sephora's number one U.S. fragrance brand, is extending into body care, and Cosmetics Business reports lip care alongside it. Ulta Beauty has appointed PacSun chief executive Brieane Olson to its board, effective today, per Global Cosmetics News. Cosmetics Business reports Fenty Beauty has reworked its hero foundation as Pro Filt'r Fluid Flex Natural Matte Longwear, three years in the making, with new shades. And finally, research firm NIQ puts men's grooming sales above seven billion dollars in twenty twenty-five, according to KPRC.