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On Tuesday night in Mumbai, Estée Lauder Companies and Nykaa announced cosmetics makers Antinorm and Mimiq and product manufacturer Hitech Formulations as this year’s winners at the Beauty & You awards.
Winners are awarded in four categories; Grow, for in-market brands, (awarded to Antinorm) Imagine, for pre-launch concepts (awarded to Mimiq), Breakthrough for innovations in beauty (awarded to Hitech Formulations), and this year, a new category, the Visionary Women’s Award, in partnership with Startup India. Inspired by Estée Lauder, the American beauty giant’s eponymous founder, the inaugural prize went to Khanak Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Sohrai Beauty. The brand was previously honoured at the 2023 awards with the Impact award for its corporate social responsibility credentials, working with local tribal women who harvest its key ingredient, mahua oil.
Award recipients will receive financial support from a prize pool of up to $500,000, as well mentoring and industry access. Gupta said the initial award gave Sohrai Beauty “the four Cs” of capital, community, contacts and credibility.
“Winning the award [in 2023] opened the first doors for me to create the brand, release our first formulations, and bring the idea to life,” said Gupta. “Now we can bring the business onto a global platform, and unlock our R&D engines,” she added. Sohrai Beauty makes high-performance skincare products using mahua oil, an ingredient native to India. The company has developed a proprietary technology to turn the oil into a butter, which it claims has superior skin-nourishing benefits.
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Estée Lauder Companies introduced the Visionary Women’s Award as a way to both honour the company’s legacy as a female-founded company, and to engage with and support local female founders. The company boasts that its leadership in India is 60 percent female.
Since its launch in 2022, almost 2,500 applicants from over 150 cities across India and the world have entered the Beauty & You Awards. The 2025 finalists were evaluated by a jury including the Estée Lauder Companies’ chief financial officer Akhil Shrivastava, as well as Anchit Nayar, chief executive of Nykaa Beauty, and Katrina Kaif, actor and co-founder of Kay Beauty.
Previous winners such as body care label Not Just Vanilla and fragrance and flavour firm Keva Fragrances have benefited from the logistical and innovation muscle of Estée Lauder Companies and Nykaa, with both firms providing mentoring and support in key areas such as distribution, marketing and consumer engagement. This year, the two companies added Startup India, a government-backed initiative, as a partner to further bolster the awards.
India is a key area of focus for Estée Lauder Companies, which has launched 14 brands in the market over the last 20 years, and has invested in local brands such as Forest Essentials, the premium Ayurvedic skincare brand. Nadine Graf, president of EMEA, UK, Ireland and emerging markets, said the company was committed to maintaining local relevancy.
“You can only achieve that when you have your own talents and teams in the market that actually breathe the local culture every single day,” she said.
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