Regent has agreed to acquire Avon North America from LG Household & Health Care, reuniting the two halves of the 140-year-old beauty brand under a single owner for the first time since 2016.
The deal, announced on Monday, is expected to close by 1 September and hands the private investment firm founded by Michael Reinstein control of Avon’s largest market, only months after it took ownership of the brand’s international arm.
Avon was carved in two in 2016, when Cerberus Capital Management took control of the North American business and separated it from the international company. The pieces then drifted to opposite ends of the world. In 2019, LG Household & Health Care agreed to buy New Avon for $125m in cash, acquiring Cerberus’s majority and Avon’s minority interest in the North American operation. A year later, Brazil’s Natura &Co bought the international business, planning to fold Avon’s vast direct-selling network into its own.
In August 2024, the Natura-owned holding company for Avon’s operations outside the US filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware, weighed down by roughly $1.3bn of debt and legacy talc liabilities stemming from hundreds of lawsuits alleging its talc products caused cancer, claims the company denied.
The operating businesses kept trading, and by December 2024 the court had approved a settlement that transferred Avon’s non-US operations back to Natura through a $125m credit bid, ring-fencing the talc claims in a liquidation trust. It was against that backdrop that Regent stepped in. Natura finalised the sale of Avon International to Regent on 31 December 2025, receiving a nominal £1 for the business while agreeing to provide a $25m secured credit facility, and retaining the Avon brand and operations across Latin America.
A nominal £1 (about $1.36) for the international arm of one of the world’s most recognisable beauty names is a startling measure of how far Avon had fallen. It is also the kind of situation Regent is built for. The firm specialises in acquiring established consumer, media, and technology businesses that larger owners have given up on, and turning them around, a portfolio that has included fashion label Escada.
Regent now runs Avon across Europe, Asia, Africa, and other markets outside North America, and adding the US closes the circle.
LG Household & Health Care is shifting toward retail and digital channels for its own beauty and wellness brands. The Korean group has agreed to sell its stake in the Avon Company to Regent affiliate Stratford Worldwide, with the exact price to be finalised at closing. Avon North America had long struggled to modernise, even as it retained a network of hundreds of thousands of representatives.
Long before social media, Avon’s representatives were, in effect, the original influencers, building businesses on personal trust and word of mouth. The irony of the influencer age is that the model Avon invented has been co-opted by everyone else. Meanwhile, Avon itself has struggled to translate door-to-door selling into the digital, creator-driven marketplace. Reinstein leaned into that heritage, saying Avon “has always stood for something bigger than beauty: opportunity, independence and human connection,” and framing reunification as the way to give the brand “clearer ownership, a shared strategy and a stronger foundation for growth.”
The combined group will be led by Lisa Siders, currently chief operating officer of Avon International and Regent’s operating partner for Avon, who becomes chief executive on closing. She succeeds Kristof Neirynck, who steered Avon International through its transformation and will stay on through the end of the year.
Siders struck a forward-looking note, saying “Avon has an extraordinary history, but its future will be built by what we do next,” and pointing to better products, sharper execution, and a stronger connection with customers.
Originally published here.