Avon, the great aunt of multilevel marketing shenanigans, at least had half-decent products for its agents to rope their friends and family into selling. Unfortunately many of them contained talc, whose mineral composition includes asbestos, generating a slim but lawsuit-sustaining link to ovarian cancer and an overwhelmingly strong one to mesothelioma. After 138 years in business, the company is bankrupt.
Beauty brand Avon Products, known for its door-to-door saleswomen, became the latest business to file for bankruptcy as a way to resolve mass lawsuits alleging that its talc products contained cancer-causing asbestos.
Avon Products is a holding company that sold its North American business in 2016 but remains on the hook for debt and legacy talc liabilities. On Monday, Avon became the latest business to file a chapter 11 case with a goal of resolving its talc-related liabilities after Johnson & Johnson and talc suppliers Imerys Talc America; Cyprus Mines; Whittaker, Clark & Daniels; and Barretts Minerals.
Gone in a puff of… never mind. Avon's remaining value is its name; the operations were already sold off to pay the victims.
