Dive Brief:

• On the same day Walgreens announced better-than-expected earnings and a permanent CEO (Stefano Pessina, who’s widely viewed as orchestrating the recent Walgreens-Boots Alliance merger), the company Thursday also said it had purchased the Liz Earle skincare brand from Avon Products. 

• Liz Earle is a U.K.-based beauty maven who became famous for criticizing high-priced beauty products as a rip-off.

• Liz Earle's once independent skincare line was purchased by Avon five years ago.

Dive Insight:

This move makes sense for both parties: Avon is desperate for the cash, and Walgreens has already positioned itself as a resource for skincare and beauty products from lower, mid-range, and even more expensive lines.

Boots also has a strong-selling line of skincare and beauty products. And, like Liz Earle’s products (and point of view) Boots products are well priced despite containing many of the same ingredients as stratospherically-priced creams.

"But making all these claims, and using airbrushed 12-year-olds to promote creams aimed at over-50s is a dishonest way of playing on insecurities and just makes people neurotic and obsessive about the issue,” Earle once told The Telegraph. "We never use the term 'anti-ageing' because there is nothing wrong with growing old.”