After publishing a parody video in 2022 about her bad experience at Body Minute, designer Laurène Levy was taken to court by the brand. Since then, the brand has been widely criticized on social networks for its poor communication and its management of the matter.
A case that turns Tiktok upside down. For several days, the beauty salon brand Body Minute has been at the heart of a controversy over the application of short videos. The brand is criticized from all sides for having sued and publicly criticized the influencer Laurène Levy.
A quick search on Tiktok allows you to realize the extent of the phenomenon. By typing “Body Minute” in the search bar, the algorithm suggests dozens of videos that criticize the brand.
“Body Minute you are giving us a tutorial on how to ruin your brand image and go bankrupt, says a user. “Body Minute, can you stop harassing Laurène?”, asks an influencer. “I have hatred for you”, plague another.
A parody video that displeases
It all started with a parody video shared by creator Laurène Levy, alias Laulevy on Tiktok in October 2022. The influencer, who defines herself as a “well-being at work activist”, then produced a short sketch where she imitates and parodies the brand’s beauticians, following a bad experience in one of the Body Minute establishments.
“So, what are we doing today? Legs, armpits, full swimsuit? No, okay… It’s a choice,” she says in the video. “Ah, you have hormonal problems… it shows.”
At the time, the video went relatively unnoticed. But Body Minute doesn’t like her at all. A few months after the video, the influencer followed by 330,000 subscribers received private messages on Instagram from Body Minute beauticians. They inform him that their company is asking employees to do everything to have his Tiktok account and video deleted. Without success.
Couriers, bailiffs and court summons
Body Minute therefore decided to move up a gear and sent several letters to the young woman’s employer at the time to ask him to delete her video, deemed “false”.
“Their hypothesis was that my employer had commissioned me to make this video, because we would be working with competing brands,” explains Laurène in an explanatory video. Body Minute then brought bailiffs to the young woman’s workplace to search her computer. According to the content creator, no proof has been found.
The story gets a little worse when Body Minute puts Laurène on notice and asks her to remove her parody video, as well as another publication where she explains the situation to her community. Faced with his refusal, the company decided to take him to court before the commercial court for “commercial denigration”, in December 2024.
False comments and defamation?
“Honestly, I didn’t think Body Minute would go this far,” she says in a video where she summarizes the situation. “At no time was my goal to insult the profession.”
For its part, Body Minute shared a video on Tiktok on December 31 where the company stated that it had taken “Laurène lahate” to court for having published “defamation” videos for purely financial purposes. The brand also accuses her of having created “dozens of fake accounts” to comment negatively on their social networks, which the designer formally denies.
For the influencer, this video is “defamatory and contains misleading remarks”. “I am quite surprised by this video, because it seems that on the contrary, it is Body Minute which asks its beauticians to leave false reviews and comments,” she specifies in a new explanatory video. She cites in particular a letter which would have been sent to the employees and franchisees of the brand.
“She created a lifelong trauma for me”
A video that has more than 1.7 million views and is setting the social network on fire. Many users then began to share their bad experiences with Body Minute and to defend Laurène.
“Your beautician said to me, ‘Shall we do a mustache?’,” I said, ‘well no’. She said to me, ‘are you sure?’ And it created a trauma for my whole life,” recalls Sindy Avecuns. “It was horrible, it burned me, I was in so much pain,” complains a user after recounting her hair removal in a beauty salon. “The biggest complex that was created for me started at 20 years old at Body Minute”, underlines another.
Faced with the “bad buzz”, Body Minute shared a video press release. “We have heard the desire of the Tiktok community to calm the situation with Laurène Levy,” assures the company.
“We did not seek to harass Laurène Levy, but only to remove her videos from the Body Minute brand because they make fun of young beauticians who are starting out in this profession,” specifies the company, which ensures that it withdraws its complaint and its videos if Laurène supercharges her content on this subject.
If the young woman does not remove her publications, the hearing date is set for January 16. “I have all the aesthetics unions who are with me, but I am afraid of the impact of this story on young women who wanted to do this profession”, slips to 20minutes Jean-Christophe David, the creator of the brand .
