Shaping Corporate Sustainability Discourse: The Case of L’Oréal

Sustainability has become a concern in the cosmetics industry, yet existing research focuses on technical aspects such as green chemistry and life-cycle impacts, leaving a gap in understanding how companies communicate and frame sustainability in their corporate discourse. Addressing this gap, this study investigates how a key player of the cosmetics industry, L’Oréal, articulates environmental sustainability and aligns its communication with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDGs 12, 13, 14 and 15. The research adopts a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative data from Refinitiv Eikon with qualitative text mining of L’Oréal’s 2024 sustainability discourse through word frequency and n-grams analyses to identify dominant themes and semantic structures in corporate reporting. Findings show that L’Oréal’s sustainability discourse is highly structured and governance-oriented by emphasizing policies. The study highlights how sustainability communication is strategically constructed, offering implications for improving transparency, accountability, and more comprehensive reporting in the cosmetics industry.