In the years after World War I, two female entrepreneurs were making their mark in the cosmetics industry: Helena Rubinstein and Florence Nightingale Graham, better known as Elizabeth Arden. Madame, as Helena Rubinstein liked to be called, and Miss Arden, as she liked to be called, couldn't have come from more different backgrounds: the former was one of eight daughters growing up in a cramped Orthodox Jewish household in the Polish city of Krakow; the latter was raised on a small farm in Ontario, Canada, where she bathed once a week on Saturday night before Sunday church and washed her hair once a month.
Yet by the time my mother was a teenager, both were on their way to building global business empires, their names etched above chains of beauty salons and on products from powder to perfume to waterproof mascara. At the height of their fame, Madame and Miss Arden were recognized as the richest, most powerful self-made women in the world.
As someone who loved to help women look and feel beautiful, my mother would have had to be blind and deaf and living in a cave not to be aware of how their products were advertised to and used by more and more women. My mother was neither blind nor deaf, and Corona was no cave.
Having successfully stepped into what were traditionally men's jobs during World War I, women were enthusiastically exploring new roles in the post-war professional world.
The number of working women would increase by 25 percent in the s. They had newfound confidence and, thanks to their earnings, the money to express that confidence through cosmetics.
At the same time, motion pictures, fashion magazines, and the society columns of newspapers popularized a new look: the plucked brows, pouting crimson lips, shaded and outlined eyes, and feathered lashes of the Jazz Age flapper.
Once considered vulgar, makeup was now meant to be noticed. Applying it was no longer a secret confined to boudoirs and powder rooms; touching up your lipstick in public was considered a statement of independence and modernity, and manufacturers soon supplied portable powder compacts and artistically decorated lipstick tubes.
Judge magazine, a popular satirical weekly, heralded football season with an illustration of a stylish young coed, cloche hat on head and Yale pennant on display, nonchalantly checking her lipstick in her mirrored compact.
The voracious demand for cosmetics rippled through the entire economy. In , The Nation magazine estimated that the "factory value of cosmetics and perfumes in [the] U. The new products and their ostentatious use made the traditional mother-to-daughter transfer of discreet beauty tips obsolete, so young women turned to a new source of wisdom: the beauty columnist.
By the mids, most magazines and newspapers had regular columns offering advice on new products and their application. Even local radio stations gave lessons in beauty culture. The beauty industry was here to stay. When she was sixteen, Esty found someone who loved "fiddling with other people's faces" as much as she did. Now, in , he started a small business called New Way Laboratories, making beauty products, suppositories, freckle remover, a treatment for dog mange, and something called Hungarian Mustache Wax.
He was also an "esthetician," the term for someone who did facials. A crucial definition: a facial is a treatment that uses creams; a makeover is one that uses makeup.
If you think of a woman's face as artwork, a facial prepares the canvas; a makeover paints it. My mother couldn't have cared less about suppositories and dog mange cures. What captured her attention was what she called her Uncle John's secret formula, something she described as "a precious velvety cream The cream may have had magic powers but Uncle John cooked it up in the most mundane setting: initially, on the gas stove in the family kitchen and later in a modest laboratory above the Longacre Theatre on Broadway.
Moreover, this quiet, bespectacled man understood his niece's interest and encouraged it. And he was willing to teach her his secrets: why a particular compound cleared up blemishes; which ingredients made an especially effective moisturizer; that cleansing oil was gentler on sensitive facial skin than soap.
Early Life. Growing Her Business. Expanding the Market. She was ninety-seven years old. Selected Works. Estee: A Success Story Allen, Margaret. Selling Dreams: Inside the Beauty Business Israel, Lee. Kennedy, Trevor. Skrebneski, Victor. Five Beautiful Women Slater, Elinor, and Robert Slater. From the Blog:.
See Also:. Donate Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women. Listen to Our Podcast. Book Club. Educator's Updates. This Week in History. Enter your email. Shop JWA Get sweet swag. During the worst years of the Great Depression, Lauder marketed her products to ever growing numbers of women. Her innovative sales techniques, including free make-up demonstrations and sample give-aways, became trademarks of her growing enterprise, and she expanded her market to women at resort hotels throughout metropolitan New York.
In the Lauders were divorced and Estee moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where she sold her products to wealthy vacationers, encouraging them to spread the word of her cosmetics through her "Tell a Woman" campaign. The Lauders remarried in and a second son, Ronald, was born in Joseph Lauder took over the financial management of the business while Estee remained in charge of marketing.
The company's first big order came from Saks Fifth Avenue in , and the Lauders, who were then their company's only employees, cooked the creams—Super Rich All Purpose Cleansing Oil, Creme Pack, and Skin Lotion—on a restaurant stove and delivered them personally. The association with Saks marked a turning point in the company's history and helped the Lauders score entrees into other fashionable stores including Nieman Marcus, Marshall Field, and Bonwit Teller.
The idea of selling her top of the line products exclusively through outlets at the best department stores became the strategy that industry specialists believe accounts for Estee Lauder's phenomenal marketing successes.
Convinced that her sales people were key to her sales strategy, Lauder traveled from New York to Texas and California, opening each Estee Lauder department store counter and carefully selecting and training the staff.
She was also determined that the models for her products not be dehumanized and that the focus always be on the whole woman rather than her facial or body parts. In Lauder introduced her first fragrance, Youth Dew, a bath oil with a sweet fragrance that doubled as a perfume. Instead of using their French perfumes by the drop behind each ear, women were using Youth Dew by the bottle in their bath water.
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