Perhaps the woman most responsible for the expansion of the cosmetics industry, both across America and throughout the world, was Helena Rubinstein. From extremely humble beginnings, Helena Rubinstein built a corporate empire that helped her become not simply one of the most recognized celebrities in the world, but amongst its richest women.



The exact year of her birth remains uncertain. Various sources quote her birth date 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 skincare 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 most often cited quote of this petite intense tycoon – she was under five feet tall - was that "there are no ugly women, only lazy ones". In pursuit of her dreams, Helena Rubinstein left behind a legacy not only of a cosmetic product line unsurpassed anywhere, but of the ability of a highly motivated woman to reach the pinnacle of corporate power.