Eugène Schueller
Eugène Paul Louis Schueller was a French chemist and entrepreneur who was the founder of L'Oréal, a leading company in cosmetics and beauty.
Founding of L'Oréal
Schueller was of Alsatian origin. He graduated in 1904 from the Institut de Chimie Appliquée de Paris and became a laboratory assistant under Victor Auger at Sorbonne. A barber asked him to develop a new hair dye, but Schueller took this opportunity to lead his own research shop.Schueller developed an innovative hair-color formula in 1907, which he called Oréale. He formulated and manufactured his own products, and sold them to Parisian hairdressers.
In 1909, he registered his company, the Société Française de Teintures Inoffensives pour Cheveux, the future L'Oréal. In his production unit, he developed the concept of proportional salary. In 1936, the social reforms led by Léon Blum in France suddenly created a vacation industry, and the sales of L'Oréal's sunscreen skyrocketed.
Support for fascism
During the early twentieth century, Schueller provided financial support and held meetings for La Cagoule at L'Oréal headquarters. La Cagoule was a violent French fascist-leaning, antisemitic and anti-communist group whose leader formed a political party Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire which in German military administration in occupied France during [World War II|Occupied France] supported the Vichy collaboration with the conquerors from Nazi Germany.In La révolution de l’économie, he wrote:
L'Oréal hired several members of the group as executives after World War II, such as Jacques Corrèze, who was CEO of the US operation. This involvement was extensively researched by Michael Bar-Zohar in his book Bitter Scent.