Cosmetics boss spells out why L'Oreal's worth it And for us, it means there are a billion or 1.5bn additional potential consumers all over the world. He adds: "They have the income and the aspiration for our kind of products, so it's for us to grab this opportunity, if not someone else will. It is a very historic opportunity for us that has never presented itself before and probably won't again. But there's another historic moment on L'Oreal's agenda which is even more immediately pressing than mankind itself: the future of Nestle's 29pc stake in the company. In 1974 Lilianne Bettencourt, daughter of L'Oreal's founder Eugene Schueller, invited Nestle to buy half her stake as she feared the French government would nationalise the company. The threat from the state never came. Meanwhile, the triggers that could break the pact - the death of Ms Bettencourt, for example - have stayed intact. The heiress, now 90 and the world's richest woman, still owns 30.5pc of L'Oreal. Lilianne Bettencourt But in April, 40 years after the agreement was made, both sides are free to sell for the first time. Last month Nestle's chairman, Peter Brabeck, said he would not seek to renew the deal and that his board was "working hard" on a plan for the stake. In the past, the expectation has been that Nestle would buy the rest of the faster growing L'Oreal, but Agon could equally use his cash to buy the stake himself. "The decision is in the hands of Nestle, they own 29.5pc of us, it's not us who own Nestle," he insists. But he admits that L'Oreal is also "looking at all the scenarios." Even so he seems to agree that the partners will go their separate ways. "The fields of nutrition are obviously very different," he says. Buying the stake, valued at €22bn, would require all the company's firepower and leave it with net debt of around three times its earnings. Is L'Oreal worth it? "I cannot say any more except that I'm pretty confident that at the end there will be a good solution for everybody," he says smoothly. Even so investors and the 100,000-strong workforce are braced for turbulence - just as the company is settling after the recent Bettencourt affair. The family, though small, has often caused disruptions, particularly since Eugene Schueller, a French chemist who founded the firm in 1909 after inventing some hair dye, supported the Vichy regime during the war. But in 2010 a political scandal was triggered when a series of recordings of conversations between Ms Bettencourt and her butler were leaked, revealing allegations about tax avoidance and donations to politicians closely associated with Nicolas Sarkozy. Meanwhile Ms Bettencourt's relationship with a photographer on whom she had bestowed as much as €1.3bn in gifts and was threatening to make her heir, had caused a deep rift with her daughter Francoise. In 2011 a court placed Ms Bettencourt's stake in L'Oreal into the guardianship of her daughter and grandsons. So how's the family now? "Very quiet," says Agon. He uses his loud laugh - the sort Brits do when they are impersonating the French, like on "Allo "Allo! - to signal an end to that topic. He's often looking for a joke, even in serious matters, though he has a reputation as a hard worker. Agon says he was born to "very hard-working parents," his mother was an architect and his father worked in pharmaceuticals. He says he "always wanted to go into business." He joined L'Oreal in 1978 at the age of 22. "I applied for marketing because I had studied finance and my finance teacher said to me, 'Jean-Paul you are definitely gifted - for marketing,"" he says, laughing. I was really fascinated by the marketing of beauty products. I think beauty is the supreme art of marketing because the marketing of beauty is about rational strategies, but it is also about intuition, taste and sophistication. He rose quickly up the ranks: at 27 he was general manager of L'Oreal in Greece followed by the same job in France and then Germany. In 1997 he set up L'Oreal in Asia in the middle of the economic crisis before being named president of US operations. Since being made chief executive of the group in 2006, Agon has pushed his views of "universalisation of beauty" - similar to globalisation but "allowing the differences of culture," he says. In practice, it's meant international expansion, including factories in Mexico, Egypt and Indonesia. Agon says the recent slowdown in emerging markets, which has caused a profits warning at Unilever, has not deterred him. "It is true that for a while the topic of emerging markets was a kind of obsession for investors and some companies," he says. But L'Oreal is a very balanced company. The revenues are roughly split equally between Europe, North America and emerging markets. But last week in Paris Agon launched a new drive for sustainability that will appeal more to its traditional customer base. Declaring that corporate responsibility is becoming as powerful as advertising in winning customers, Agon pledged to cut L'Oreal's carbon emissions by 60pc by 2020 and vowed that 100pc of its products would have an "environmental or social benefit" by the same year. In a bid to reduce water consumption both by the company and its customers, he said L'Oreal scientists were developing a shampoo that would require just one litre of water to rinse out rather than the average requirement of seven litres. Pledging to create a "new model of economic development" for a "21st century L'Oreal," he also promised benefits such as health and life insurance to all employees. But he won't say how much it costs, saying it's "unfair" to focus on the economics of the strategy. In 2020 we will be able to see what all these measures have cost and to see how positive they have been on the company. Maybe L'Oreal's investors will be happy with that for the moment. But if Nestle's stake is sold to institutional investors, Agon is likely to find a greater demand for transparency. Agon says he's prepared for any eventuality. "I don't feel tired," he says. I will be here for many more years I hope.