Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein built a cosmetics empire out of a jar of face cream she brought to Australia in a trunk, and spent the profits on modern art. She was the eldest of eight daughters of a Krakow shopkeeper, left to avoid an arranged marriage, and arrived in Melbourne around 1896 with twelve pots of a Hungarian cream. The Australian sun and the local complexions did the marketing; she opened a salon in Melbourne, then London in 1908, Paris, then New York, and built a business on the then-novel proposition that skin came in types requiring different products - which was partly science and substantially invention, and which is the structure of the industry to this day. Her rivalry with Elizabeth Arden lasted fifty years and neither ever met the other. She sold the American business to Lehman Brothers in 1928 for eight million dollars, bought it back after the crash for around a tenth of that, and quadrupled it. The money went on art: she bought Elie Nadelman's entire London exhibition in 1911 and brought him to New York, and collected Picasso, Miro, Brancusi and one of the great private holdings of African sculpture. She was four foot ten, worked until she was ninety-two, and left a foundation that still funds women's health and education. She commissioned portraits of herself from Dali, Dufy and Sutherland among others. Her art collection was sold at Parke-Bernet in 1966 over several days. She lived in a triplex on Park Avenue and was robbed at gunpoint there at eighty-eight, refusing to open the safe.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history