Estée Lauder Batch Codes: Plant, Month, Year in 3 Characters

Estée Lauder group codes are three characters — occasionally four, when the plant identifier takes two letters. Read them from the right: the last character is the year digit, the one before it is the month, and everything to the left is the plant.

The month follows the industry's most common shorthand: digits 1 to 9 for January through September, then A, B and C for October, November and December, because there are no single digits left.

This is why reading the code from the left gets people into trouble. In the code EA4, the A is not a plant — it is October. The plant is E, the month is A, and the year ends in 4.

• Ignore everything except the last two characters.
• Second-to-last character: 1–9 is that month number; A, B or C is October, November or December.
• Last character: the year's final digit. Pick the most recent year that ends in it.

On skincare jars and bottles, the code is stamped on the base — often embossed rather than printed, so it catches light rather than ink. On MAC and Bobbi Brown colour cosmetics it is on the back of the compact or the base of the lipstick barrel.

Jo Malone and Tom Ford fragrance carry it on the box base and on the bottle's underside sticker, the same convention the rest of the fragrance industry uses.

Three characters is short enough that people mistake other stamps for the batch code. If what you are reading is longer than four characters, it is probably a factory line marking, not the date code.

Month precision only — the decoder estimates the 15th of the month. And a single-digit year repeats every decade, so a code decoding to May 2026 could in principle be May 2016. The decoder assumes the recent reading; the product's condition and packaging design usually settle which is right.

The plant letter is genuinely uninformative for shelf life. It matters to Estée Lauder's quality control and to nobody else.