On Thursday that business, now an empire, a top French brand and a leader in the world of cosmetics under the name of L'Oreal, celebrates 100 years of satisfying vanity and riding the long rise of spending on body care products.

Since the early years when Schueller invented new recipes by night and delivered to hairdressers by bicycle by day, L'Oreal has survived through the Great Depression, two world wars and the growth of competition in ever-more prosperous economies.

However, Schueller attracted controversy for having extreme right-wing connections before and after the occupation of France in World War II.

The founding family has been in the news recently over acrimonious litigation between Liliane Bettencourt, Schueller's daughter, and her own daughter Francoise Bettencourt-Myers.

The daughter took court action to challenge gifts totalling nearly a billion euros (S$2 billion) from the family fortune by her mother to a friend, a photographer.

The Swiss food giant Nestle acquired 28.9 per cent of the group in 2004. But Liliane Bettencourt remains the top shareholder, making her one of the wealthiest women in the world with a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine in 2008 at 23 billion dollars.

She herself began working in the business at the age of 15, mixing cosmetics and labelling bottles of shampoo.

L'Oreal is one of three top world groups in this market which, over 100 years, has reached down through the middle classes to new segments of working people in emerging economies. -- AFP