Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty

Synopsis

Long before SKII, La Prairie, or the coveted Creme de la Mer, there was Helena Rubinstein. Your mother or grandmother probably used Helena Rubinstein creams or cosmetics once upon a time. But not that many people know about Helena's Australian connections. She was little known and has been virtually forgotten, but her extraordinary life spanned nearly a century (she died in 1965 at the age of ninety-three) and three continents. She was banished by her family to Australia at age 24 for refusing to accept an arranged marriage and as a result, became a pioneer who reinvented beauty for modern times. Napoleon Perdis says that he is inspired by Helena. She really was a Polish modern day Scarlett O'Hara! This is the extraordinary story of the woman who created a cosmetic empire and gave it her name, of an entrepreneur who started with nothing except a belief in the strength of women. The eldest of eight girls in a poor Jewish Orthodox family, Helena was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1872. When she was banished to Australia her mother decided to slip a few pots of skin cream, made by a chemist friend of the family, into her daughter's suitcase. Barely two decades later, the cream her mother gave her had become the foundation of her fortune. Coleraine in Victoria, where her uncle was a shopkeeper, might have been an "awful place" but it did not lack for lanolin, the secret ingredient in Helena's creams. To disguise the sheep oil's pungent pong, Helena experimented with lavender, pine bark and water lilies. At the forefront of women's rights movements, Helena opened her first beauty institute in Collins Street, Melbourne in 1902, the year that women obtained the right to vote in Australia. Always ahead of her competitors (Arden, Factor, Revlon, Lauder), she developed marketing and advertising techniques that revolved around skin care and makeup, eventually opening beauty institutes in Australia, London, Paris, and New York. Using science