We continue to expect A&CP to be in the high-20s percentage level of sales in full-year fiscal ‘24 and beyond Moving tour profit delivery for the quarter. Our Q3 adjusted operating income grew a strong 17%, driving 90 basis points of margin expansion. Our Q3 adjusted EBITDA grew 10% year-over year to $200 million, with the Q3 adjusted EBITDA margin increasing 30 basis points to 14.4%. Our year-to-date adjusted operating income grew 19%, resulting in an 80 basis point increase in year-to-date adjusted operating margin. And adjusted EBITDA totaled $927 million, growing 15% from the prior year, with the adjusted EBITDA margin up 30 basis points, at the upper end of our full-year guidance. We continue to expect strong income growth and margin expansion going forward.
And, that brings me tour adjusted EPS Excluding the impact from the equity swap, our Q3 adjusted EPS totaled $0.06. Our headline diluted adjusted EPS of $0.05 included an EPS hurt of $0.01 from the mark-to-market on the equity swap due to the stock price decrease in Q3. Fiscal year-to-date, our adjusted EPS excluding the swap totaled $0.041 and grew by 8% year-over-year. Our headline fiscal year-to-date EPS included a $0.02 per share negative impact from the mark to market on the equity swap. Looking ahead to fiscal year ‘24, I would like to outline certain drivers of our adjusted EPS. First, we continue to expect depreciation to be in the $230 million to $240 million range. Second, we continue to anticipate net interest expense for the year to be in the mid $200 million.
Third, we anticipate the adjusted effective tax rate for fiscal 2024 to be in the high-20s, including some potential discreet tax benefits in Q4, which we expect to balance the discrete tax hurts we incurred in Q1. Finally on fiscal 2024 share count, we executed the first tranche of our equity swap agreement of 27 million shares on February 22 at the very attractive price of $7.40, which partially benefited Q3 and will fully benefit Q4 share count. We expect to exit Q4 with a diluted share count of 875 million. Moving tour free cash flow Q3 is our seasonally weaker cash flow period, with outflow of $234 million this year. This compared to outflow of approximately $180 million prior year. The year-on-year decline in free cash flow in Q3 and fiscal year-to-date reflected to two key drivers.
First, the payment of income taxes for prior years, which totaled over $50 million year-to-date; and second, the timing of working capital payments, pretax, which should reverse in Q4. Looking to the full-year, we expect our free cash flow to be solid and broadly consistent with fiscal ‘23 at approximately $400 million, as the strong profit expansion is balanced by a step up in cash tax payments related to prior year balances as well as higher working capital particularly as we’ve built up inventory to support our business in the current dynamic environment. In FY ‘25, free cash flow is expected to grow, on stronger profit and lower cash tax payments. Moving tour capital structure. We ended Q3 with net debt of approximately $3.7 billion.
As a result, our leverage at the end of the quarter was around 3.4 times, up from around 3.1 times at the end of Q2 due to the seasonally low Q3 cash flow coupled with the impact of the share buyback at a cash cost of $200 million. Factoring in our Wella stake, we ended the quarter with economic net debt of approximately $2.6 billion. We remain committed to reaching an investment grade profile, targeting leverage towards approximately 2.5 times exiting calendar ‘24 and towards approximately 2 times exiting calendar ‘25, which we believe we can reach through our organic free cash flow generation and EBITDA expansion. At the same time, we also continue to target divesting our Wella stake by end of calendar ‘25. Looking ahead, our strong continued progress on deleveraging and debt paydown support our expectation for our interest expense to steadily decline in the coming years I will now hand it back to Sue to review our strategic progress in the quarter
Sue Nabi: Thank you, Laurent. Let me take a few minutes to discuss the progress we continue to make on our six strategic pillars. Beginning with our first strategic pillar, growing our Consumer Beauty business Consumer Beauty revenues grew 6% like-for-like in Q3 and 7% like-for-like fiscal year-to-date. Importantly, the global mass beauty market continued to grow by a mid-single-digit percentage in Q3, while our Consumer Beauty business continued to grow in line with the mass market. We once again benefitted from the geographic and category diversification of our Consumer Beauty portfolio. We delivered solid growth in mass color cosmetics even as the market growth has normalized toward historical levels and the industry saw softness in the U.S. mass cosmetics category.
At the same time, our diversified portfolio allowed us to benefit from strong category growth in mass fragrances, mass skin care and body care, which drove double-digit percentage growth in many of our brands, including brands Beckham, BrunBanani, Monange, Bozzanand Paixao Channel-wise, we continue to outperform in the critical e-commerce channel, once again gaining market share. Our Consumer Beauty e-commerce revenues grew approximately 30% like for like in Q3. And in brick & mortar, Coty’s global shelf space remained broadly stable in the resets that took place in Spring 2024, and the initial indicators suggest that our shelf space should remain broadly stable in fall 2024. As we discussed on our first and second quarter earnings calls, our focus in fiscal 24 has been on actively step-changing our social media reach in order to drive our brands and build stronger community engagement, underpinned by disruptive innovation.
We’re already seeing very strong positive impacts. In fact, in March, CoverGirl propelled to the number three rank for earned media value in the U.S. among the brand’s peer set, which is a very strong increase from the brand’s number five in Q3 and the number six rank in Q3 of last year. And, CoverGirl’s year-over-year EMV rose nearly 1.5 times in the third quarter, which was the highest growth amongst the brand’s competitive set. This speaks not only to the quality of CoverGirl’s disruptive innovations, like the Simply Ageless Skin Perfector Essence, as well as Outlast Lipstain, but also to Coty’s activation strategy, where the launches have been amplified by thousands of influencers. As a result, Essence has become a Top five foundation on Amazon and number one in Canada’s omnichannel.
The combination of CoverGirl’s distinctive brand equity, disruptive innovation and the strong momentum we are gaining in social media advocacy is allowing CoverGirl to outperform the established cosmetics brands at U.S. mass retailers while simultaneously outperforming in e-commerce. At the same time, our leading European brand Rimmel has risen to the number four rank in earned media value in Q3 in the U.K. among the brand’s peer set, up from number five in third quarter of 2023. Rimmel’s year-over-year EMV growth was over 75% in Q3, as we’re actively working with Rimmel’s Creator Crew to develop new products and launches and promote our hero products. Our mission is to outperform the mass market through disruptive innovation amplified by social media advocacy and of course we will continue to overdrive on advocacy across our other Consumer Beauty brands.
