Sephora has been given the go-ahead by a Californian federal judge to settle a class action brought by customers of Asian origin against the retailer, according to a report published by Law 360.

The LVMH-owned perfumery chain is set to pay out US$950,000 to those who had their accounts deactivated in the run-up to a promotional Beauty Insider event in 2014 – which the plaintiffs claimed was discriminatory as Sephora made the call based on their Asian-origin email addresses.

Sephora vehemently denied the claims that it deactivated accounts with Chinese domain-name email addresses at the time, claiming that consumers all over the world were affected by the ‘temporary outage’ of its website.