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Perhaps the person most responsible for the expansion of the cosmetics
industry, both across the United Sates and around the globe, was Helena
Rubinstein. From extremely humble beginnings, Helena Rubinstein built a
corporate empire that resulted in her becoming not simply one of the
most recognized names in the world, but amongst its wealthiest persons.
It
is unclear exactly when she was born. Various sources quote her date of
birth as being on Christmas Day, 1870, 1871 and 1872. Whatever the
case, her place of birth indisputably was in Krakau, in what is today’s
Poland. Helena was one of eight children of Augusta and Horace
Rubinstein, the latter an egg vendor. Helena reportedly enrolled in
medical school but dropped out. When at age 20 she was being pushed to
marry a widowed aristocrat, she moved to Australia.
It was while
in Australia that she took the first steps that would lead to her later
worldwide cosmetics empire. In 1902 she opened a small salon in
Melbourne, where she instructed local women on makeup and sold a
crème called "Creme Valaze", apparently claiming the crème had
restorative properties. Whether or not her claims were true, sales were
brisk, for her intuition had told her that Australian women with their
reddish sun-drenched complexions would be an excellent market for her
crème which promised a milky complexion. She was so successful that by
1908 she has saved up a considerable fortune, and she moved to London
where she opened another salon.
That same year she met her
husband to be, Edward Titus, an American journalist, with whom she had
two children. She moved to Paris and opened a salon there in 1912, but
with the commencement of World War I, the family chose to emigrate to
New York, where she opened her first American salon in 1915. She would
divorce her husband in 1917. Helena said of her adopted homeland:
“All the American women had purple noses and gray lips and their faces
were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United
States could be my life's work."
And indeed it would be. She
would go on to become perhaps the greatest female entrepreneur of the
century, spreading her skin care advice and treatments rapidly
throughout the country. Helena exhibited a keen understanding of
marketing techniques, the importance of high-end packaging for her
products, the value of having celebrities endorse her cosmetics, and
the trick of tagging the products with high prices. In addition she was
extremely adept at corporate finance. Perhaps the most famous example
of the latter was when she sold her U.S. business interests to Lehman
Brothers for more than $7 million in 1928, an almost unheard of amount
at the time. Later, with the arrival of the depression, she bought her
business back for under $1 million, proceeding thereafter to
continuously expand her empire of salons across the country and the
world.
Helena married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia in 1938,
a man twenty-three years younger than her. Between then and the time of
her death in 1965 (at an estimated age of 95) she continued to expand
her cosmetics empire to the point that it was worth well over $100
million, while concurrently establishing several charitable
organizations and foundations, as well as museums.
The alleged
“mantra" of this petite dynamic tycoon – she was under five feet tall -
was that "there are no ugly women, only lazy ones". In her mission to
make her dream a reality, Helena Rubinstein left behind a legacy that
evidenced, for the first time in our history, the power of a female to
achieve her greatest ambitions.
The author, Michael Rupkalvis, runs the MineralMakeupShoppe website. The website discusses a new mineral
makeup, which is a pressed all-natural mineral makeup that is easy to apply and does not stain your clothes.
Disclaimer: All information on this site is provided for informational purposes only! By no means is any
information presented herein intended to substitute for the advice provided to you by any health care or other professional
or organization.
