Foundation — a swamplink research property
A $19 drugstore foundation and a $53 prestige one, both owned by L'Oréal, declare the same first nine ingredients in the same order. Here is how far that pattern goes.
L'Oréal Paris Infallible ($18.99) and Lancôme Teint Idole ($53.00) declare the same first nine ingredients, in the same order. Lancôme then inserts its botanical and skincare story — moringa seed extract, yacon root juice, glycerin, alpha-glucan oligosaccharide, sodium hyaluronate — and rejoins the same backbone underneath. Both brands belong to L'Oréal. Both filings declare octinoxate at 6.7%.
| # | L'Oréal Paris Infallible 32H · $18.99 | Lancôme Teint Idole Ultra Wear · $53.00 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | water | water |
| 2 | dimethicone | dimethicone |
| 3 | isododecane | isododecane |
| 4 | alcohol denat | alcohol denat |
| 5 | trimethylsiloxysilicate | trimethylsiloxysilicate |
| 6 | butylene glycol | butylene glycol |
| 7 | peg-10 dimethicone | peg-10 dimethicone |
| 8 | perlite | perlite |
| 9 | synthetic fluorphlogopite | synthetic fluorphlogopite |
| 10 | nylon-12 | moringa oleifera seed extract |
| 11 | isopropyl lauroyl sarcosinate | polymnia sonchifolia root juice |
| 12 | diisopropyl sebacate | calcium aluminum borosilicate |
| 13 | hdi/trimethylol hexyllactone crosspolymer | glycerin |
| 14 | disteardimonium hectorite | dipentaerythrityl tetrahydroxystearate/tetraisostearate |
| 15 | bis-peg/ppg-14/14 dimethicone | alpha-glucan oligosaccharide |
| 16 | magnesium sulfate | sodium hyaluronate |
| 17 | aluminum hydroxide | silica |
| 18 | phenoxyethanol | silica silylate |
Highlighted rows are positions where the two labels declare the identical ingredient. Sources: FDA filing (filed 2024-06-28) and FDA filing (filed 2024-06-26).
One striking pair proves nothing. The test is whether same-owner pairs across the whole corpus are more alike than chance would give. Shuffling the parent-company labels across the twelve products and recomputing the gap builds the null distribution directly — no distributional assumptions, which matters at this sample size.
| Similarity measure | Same owner | Different owner | Gap | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| head10 overlap | 0.538 | 0.389 | +0.150 | 0.0056 |
| jaccard | 0.299 | 0.154 | +0.144 | 0.0000 |
| identical prefix | 2.615 | 1.000 | +1.615 | 0.0018 |
All three survive dropping the two same-brand pairs
(Infallible 24H/32H and the two Teint Idoles), which are two generations of one product line
rather than two brands under one owner. 20,000 permutations, seed fixed in
tools/analyze.py.
| A | B | Top-10 shared | Identical from top | Shared owner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| L'Oréal Paris | L'Oréal Paris | 100% | 12 | L'Oréal |
| L'Oréal Paris | Lancôme | 90% | 9 | L'Oréal |
| L'Oréal Paris | Lancôme | 90% | 9 | L'Oréal |
| L'Oréal Paris | Dior | 70% | 1 | — |
| L'Oréal Paris | Dior | 70% | 1 | — |
| MAC | Dior | 70% | 2 | — |
| Lancôme | Dior | 70% | 1 | — |
| Revlon | L'Oréal Paris | 60% | 1 | — |
What this does and does not show. Shared declared ingredients in shared order is strong evidence of a shared formulation platform — a common base that sibling brands build on. It is not proof that two products are the same thing in different bottles. Concentrations below roughly 1% may be listed in any order, the filings do not disclose concentrations, and pigment load, particle treatment, milling and manufacturing tolerance all differ in ways no ingredient list records. Twelve products is also a small corpus, and L'Oréal contributes four of them.