Part IThe Story
Sometime in 1902 (the day went unrecorded, though the guest list survived), five people sat down in the Winter Garden tea room in Melbourne to talk about a jar of face cream that did not yet exist. The Winter Garden was an artists' haunt, and one of the five worked there. She was a waitress, somewhere around thirty years old (the documents that would settle her age were among the first things she edited), four feet ten inches tall, with a Polish accent, a wardrobe that looked more expensive than her wages allowed, and a complexion people stared at. Across from her sat James Henry Thompson, general manager of the Robur Tea Company and, in the dry phrasing of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, "an admirer." Around them sat a young artist, a printer, and the waitress's younger sister Ceska, lately arrived from Kraków.
What came out of the meeting was simple. Thompson put up £100. The artist designed a label, and the printer printed it.
The label said Crème Valaze, a name that sounded French and meant nothing in any language. In time the advertising around it would explain that the cream was the creation of an eminent European skin specialist, a Dr. Lykuski, "compounded from rare herbs which only grow in the Carpathian mountains." The jar held something more local. According to the late Angus Trumble, who spent the last years of his life reconstructing her Australian decade, the cream "was run up locally in the firm of Felton Grimwade in Flinders Lane and consisted largely of lanolin, wax and cheap scent." He added: "She was not above using bleach." Each jar cost tenpence to fill, and by some accounts less. It sold for six shillings.
Of the five people at that table, history kept the name of exactly one, and she spent the following sixty-three years making sure the meeting stayed forgotten. In her own telling there was no tea-room syndicate and no tea-company admirer. There was a Miss MacDonald, met aboard the Prinz-Regent Luitpold on the voyage out, who lent her £250, along with twelve pots of her mother's cream packed into a trunk in Kraków, a dozen hard days, and destiny. Trumble called this "the myth that she carefully embroidered throughout her life," and the historians who came after him have tried, with uneven success, to pick the stitches out.
In that first story the label comes before the product, the name before the substance, and the fiction before the fortune. The order held for the rest of her life. She was born Chaja Rubinstein in the Jewish quarter of Kraków. She would be Helena in Melbourne, "Madame" in London, Paris and New York, Princess Gourielli-Tchkonia on a Park Avenue lease, and for one brief stretch of the Depression the former owner of her own name. By her death on April 1, 1965, that name was on salons, factories and laboratories in fifteen countries and on the paychecks of 32,000 people. Every one of those was, in some sense, a reprint of the label designed at the Winter Garden.
By the Numbers
The Valaze Empire
10d → 6sCost to fill, and retail price of, the first jar of Crème Valaze
£100Stake from James Thompson of the Robur Tea Co., 1902
£12,000Earned from Valaze in the first two years
$7.3MPrice Lehman Brothers paid for the American business, 1928
~$1.5MApproximate cost of regaining control after the Crash
32,000Staff in salons, factories, and labs at her death
~$130MDistributed by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, 1953–2011
The grease of seventy-five million sheep
The record contradicts itself about her from the start. Her father, Naftali Herz Rubinstein ("Horace" in the anglicized version his daughter later preferred), was an egg merchant according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, a kerosene dealer according to The New Yorker, a wholesale food broker according to the Jewish Women's Archive, and a plain shopkeeper according to Wikipedia. He may have been all of these in turn, a man of what the ADB calls "mediocre business abilities" moving from one small trade to the next in Kazimierz. Her mother, Gitel Silberfeld, called Augusta, was the one whose influence Helena carried out of Poland. She raised eight surviving daughters (two boys died in infancy) on a doctrine that sounds, from this distance, like a business plan. Her daughters, she told them, would gain power and influence through beauty and love. Each night she put cream on their faces. She also gave advice that her eldest followed only selectively: "If you want to be really clever, listen well and talk little."
Helena, as the eldest, kept her father's books. She said she attended her first business meeting at fifteen, standing in for him while he was ill. A cousin, Martin Buber, would become one of the century's great existentialist philosophers. Whether she ever read him is unknown, and the question seems beside the point.
Her later account turned this household into a moneyed one, gave her a place at the University of Kraków and a course of medical study in Switzerland, which she said she abandoned because she fainted in the wards. The account was persuasive enough that Harvard's reference work Notable American Women repeated it as fact. The Jewish Review of Books corrected it bluntly: "In reality, she never finished secondary school."
What is certain is that a marriage was arranged and that she refused it. Sources describe the suitor as a wealthy widower, and one of them makes him thirty-five. In 1896 (possibly 1894, since even the year of her arrival is unsettled) she landed in Melbourne with almost no English and no money, and went inland to Coleraine in Victoria's Western District to stay with her mother's brother. Most sources call him Louis Silberfeld. At least one calls him Bernard. The ADB, more precise and more amused, describes him as "a storekeeper and part-time oculist."
She hated Coleraine. Long afterward she called it "that awful place" and said she had been hungry, lonely and poor there. She took English lessons at a small local school and, the ADB reports, shocked her teachers by asking, "what does 'bugger' mean? My uncle calls me that."
Coleraine had one thing in abundance, though: sheep. As the crime novelist Shane Maloney put it in The Monthly, sheep "were the wealth of the nation" (some 75 million of them across Australia), and the Western District's merino flocks "produced the finest wool in the land, secreting abundant grease in the process." That grease is lanolin, and lanolin was a main ingredient of the cream she had brought from Kraków. The district's women had skin coarsened by sun and dust, and they noticed the newcomer's pale, milky complexion and asked what she used. She sent home for more jars. Then, more cheaply, she started making her own, using pine bark, lavender and water lilies to cover the "pungent pong" of the sheep.
The pattern was set here, two thousand miles inland, before any salon existed. The raw material was local and cheap. The provenance was distant and expensive. She would later claim, in what the ADB calls an "outrageous" flourish, that she had only gone to Australia to test the cream in a "tropical" climate. She also claimed she might have stayed a small-town trader if she had not fallen out with her uncle. The ADB judges that claim "implausible," and it is, but it shows how she wanted the story told. Every move was framed as a calculation, and none as an escape.
The fall-out with the uncle did happen. After it she became a governess, possibly in Queensland near Toowoomba and certainly at Meltham, near Geelong, where she looked after the sons of a man named Steve Fairbairn. After that came Melbourne, waitressing at the Café Maison Dorée on Swanston Street and then at the Winter Garden. Sources place her in a boarding house run by an Elizabeth Stern on Grey Street, St. Kilda. Melbourne was then the largest city in Australia, with about 496,000 people, rich from the gold rushes of the 1850s and 1860s and enjoying one of the highest standards of living in the world. It had money, sun and women with damaged skin. She saw the opportunity, and the decade of governessing and waitressing left her impatient to take it.
She never went back to Coleraine. Maloney ended his piece on her with what may be the most Australian sentence ever written about a cosmetics magnate: "Her initial associates, the merinos, are believed to have all been eaten."
A small woman standing on a chair
The first salon opened in 1902 in the O'Connor Building at 138 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne. The building is still there, altered. In early 1903 she began advertising in The Age, The Argus and Table Talk. Within a year she had moved to larger rooms at 243 Collins Street, the city's fashionable address, and within two years, according to the ADB, Crème Valaze had earned her £12,000.
Those are large numbers for a jar of sheep grease and scent, and the explanation is in how she sold it. She did not run a shop. She ran something closer to a clinic. A woman coming into the Collins Street rooms was examined, in some accounts under a special light that showed every flaw. Her skin was "diagnosed," and a treatment was "prescribed." Maloney, again: she was "selling glamour as a science." The prescription seldom stopped at one jar, because the diagnosis implied that the cream alone, without the matching cleanser and lotion, would not do the job. Before the term existed, she had invented the product line, the regimen, and the consultation as a sales channel.
The ADB records the scene that best captures the early salon. Through the actress Nellie Stewart she gained the patronage of Stewart's friend Nellie Melba, the most famous singer Australia had produced and possibly the most famous Australian alive. Melba came to the salon. While she was there she sang Aida, and tiny Helena stood on a chair to examine the diva's complexion.
The scene compresses a whole business into one picture. A celebrity performs, and the proprietor, too small to see her properly, climbs up to get a better look. The cosmetics trade would spend the next century elaborating that arrangement.
Pricing was also part of the act. Six shillings for Valaze, or five shillings and sixpence in another account, was a large sum when, as one reviewer of Ruth Brandon's Ugly Beauty noted, a milliner earned about £2 a week. Her buyers were Melbourne's "bachelor girls," young women with their own wages who were not inclined to ask a husband's permission before spending them. She soon learned the most counterintuitive rule of her trade, which Brandon describes this way: "If a product faltered initially, she would hike the price to raise the perceived value." In the cosmetics business, people do not buy the cheaper jar to get the same result. They buy the more expensive one to get a better result, and the price persuades them that they have.
Brandon's full description of the method is worth having, because it is less a condemnation than an inventory:
She knew how to advertise—using 'fear copy with a bit of blah-blah'— and introduced the concept of 'problem' skin types. She also pioneered the use of pseudo-science in marketing, donning a lab coat in many advertisements, despite the fact that her only training had been a two-month tour of European skin-care facilities.
Calling it fear copy was fair. The slogan she chose was not about fear, though. It was about power. "Beauty is Power" was among the first lines she used to sell her creams, and Trumble judged that it struck "an enormously powerful chord with Edwardian women." The two ideas do not cancel out. The fear was that your skin was failing, and the power was that you could fix it, at six shillings a jar. Later she would put it more bluntly, in the line that became her most quoted: there were no ugly women, she said, only lazy ones.
In 1907 she applied for naturalisation as a British subject. A copy of the application appears in Trumble's book. By then the governess-waitress had become a proprietor, the proprietor had become an expert, and the expert was getting ready to leave. Melbourne had paid for her apprenticeship. She was about to ask London for her tuition back.
Seven sisters and no sons
Banks in that period did not make business loans to women. Every source that touches her move to London says so, usually as an aside, but it explains most of what followed. She could not borrow her way into Europe, so she had to save her way there, which she did, though the sources cannot agree on the currency. One says she took $100,000 to London in 1908. Another says £100,000, which would be an enormous sum. The safer conclusion is that it was everything she had and that Australia had produced it. Melbourne and a Sydney salon funded the next step, and the next step funded the one after.
Capital was one problem. People were a harder one. An empire spread across several continents, run by an owner who trusted almost nobody, needed managers who could not easily leave. She had seven sisters: Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka and Erna.
In 1908 Ceska took over Melbourne. When Helena moved on to Paris in 1912, Manka took over London. Pauline went to Paris. The arrangements changed over the years (by the late 1930s Ceska was in London and Manka in Paris), and the sisters were moved around the map like a family franchise system run on blood ties instead of contracts. A reviewer of Brandon's book wrote that her strategy was to employ six of her seven sisters. A Rubinstein sister could quarrel with Helena, as several did, and could be cheated by her, but could not go to work for Elizabeth Arden.
The next generation followed. Mala Kolin, a niece, was born in Kraków on December 31, 1905, and went to Paris at eighteen to learn the business from her aunt. She stayed from the 1920s until the sale to L'Oréal in the 1980s. She took the family name professionally as Mala Rubinstein, became vice president for creative services, wrote several beauty books, and taught the salon's treatment lessons. In the last decade of Helena's life Mala was, as one account puts it, "the only one showing interest in the empire." Mala's brother Oscar Kolin eventually chaired the company. Helena's son Roy worked in the business too. Kraków's girls, and some of their sons, were taken one at a time into a business built to keep them close.
London in 1908 was Edwardian London: wealthy, devoted to pleasure, and spending heavily on appearances. The Salon de Beauté Valaze made money from the start. That year she also married Edward William Titus, a Polish-born American journalist she had met in Melbourne. In the sources he is the one person who helped her look like a European rather than simply be one. He wrote her publicity material. He had literary taste, and later, in Paris, he set up a small press that published modern writers, D. H. Lawrence among them, and hired Samuel Putnam to translate the memoirs of Alice Prin, the model known as Kiki de Montparnasse. Titus was a publisher who placed a few books with writers he admired, married to a woman who placed a few hundred products with her own name on every one. Their sons arrived on schedule: Roy Valentine Titus on December 12, 1909, and Horace on April 23, 1912.
When Edward VII died in 1910, London went into mourning, and by her reckoning it stopped being profitable. So in 1912 she went to Paris and bought a small existing beauty business. Then she did what she had first done in Melbourne. She wrote to some of the smartest women in Paris and offered each one a free Swedish massage. One of them was Colette, who became a convert and praised massage as essential for women. Sarah Bernhardt and Cécile Sorel became clients. Paris in this period is also where, sources say, she first laid out a classification of skin types, the dry, oily, combination and sensitive that every beauty counter still uses. By 1910 she had stated what now seems obvious and then was new: different skins need different treatments. Whether she invented the idea or just named it before anyone else matters less than the result, which was that once skin had types it needed several products, and she could sell all of them.
Her marriage, her children, her sisters and her nieces all ran on the same timetable, which was the business's. Years later Roy introduced her autobiography by saying her life and work were "so inseparable that a book dealing with one aspect without the other would seem incomplete." That was meant as tribute, and by the end of her life it also read as a diagnosis.
Direct from Paris, made in Queens
The art dealer Joseph Duveen, who began crossing the Atlantic in 1886 at seventeen, built a fortune on a single observation, as his chroniclers summarize it: Europe had plenty of art and America had plenty of money. Helena Rubinstein reached New York at the end of 1914, with the war closing off Europe, and acted on the same idea with lighter goods. Europe had prestige. America had money and was willing to pay for prestige.
She toured the country first, scouting sites. She was short of money. In letters to Rosa Hollay, a manager she wrote to constantly, she mixed ambition with alarm. On December 12, 1914, she wrote:
It does cost a fortune to start here but our place will be the very best and very smartest.
On January 9, 1915: "I am frightfully short of money." Some undated letter in between says, "I am simply itching to start business here." About 1,250 of these letters, covering 1914 to 1927 and written from New York, London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, were offered at Sotheby's with an estimate of £30,000 to £50,000. They are the nearest thing to her unedited voice. The tone throughout is part nervous accountant, part general on campaign.
The first American Maison de Beauté Valaze opened in May 1915 at 15 East 49th Street, on a lease signed the previous December. The rooms were designed by Paul T. Frankl, a modernist designer, and were nothing like a beauty parlor. The walls were covered in dark-blue cloth, the baseboards and moldings were painted deep rose, and the rosewood and mahogany furniture was upholstered in rose silk. On one wall was a bas-relief by Elie Nadelman, a Polish-born sculptor who, like his patron, had left the old country to remake himself in a modern idiom. (She once bought out an entire gallery show of his work.) The press covered the decor as news, and she noticed that coverage of the art cost her nothing. She would use the same tactic for fifty years.
Expansion then came quickly: San Francisco, Philadelphia and New Orleans in 1916, Chicago in 1917, Atlantic City in 1918, Boston in 1920. In 1918 the New York salon moved to 46 West 57th Street. Department stores began to carry the line, among them the City of Paris in San Francisco and Halle Brothers in Cleveland, along with selected drugstores such as the Warner Drug Company in Nashville and the Jermyn Drug Company in Scranton. In 1916 she incorporated the Helena Rubinstein Beauty Products Manufacturing Company and opened a factory at 208 Rawson Street, Long Island City, in Queens.
That factory is the key detail of the American years. Making the creams in Queens saved her the import duties she had been paying on European stock. It did not stop her, as the cosmetics historians at Cosmetics and Skin point out, from "claiming or suggesting that her cosmetics were 'direct from Paris.'" The manufacturing was local and the mythology was foreign, exactly as it had been with the lanolin of Coleraine and the herbs of the Carpathians. Only the scale had grown.
Her own origins were adjusted as needed. In America during the war she presented herself as "Europe's famous beauty expert" and, since Austria was now allied with Germany, as Russian rather than Viennese. Dr. Lykusky, the Hungarian chemist who had supposedly given her mother the original formula and whom she had once credited, gradually disappeared from the labels. "Dr. Lykuski's Blackhead and Open Pore Cure" became "Valaze Blackhead and Open Pore Paste." The doctor had served his purpose. Now that the products sold on her name, she did not need his.
The years that followed were, on the evidence, the period of her loosest claims. In a 1922 interview she said she had experimented with a "monkey serum" for older women, borrowing the vocabulary of Serge Voronoff, the Paris surgeon who was then grafting primate glands onto aging men. "I tried the serum on two sisters," she said, "elderly women, between fifty and sixty years old." She claimed in early interviews to have studied with Voronoff. Cosmetics and Skin's judgment is that this "probably meant that she had read newspaper reports or one of his books." In January 1928, while moving her New York salon to 8 East 57th Street, she gave the Brooklyn Daily Eagle her opinion of a paper by Alexis Carrel on immortal cell lines. She agreed with his conclusion and worked in the new address.
She also went to Hollywood, and before that she worked with Theda Bara, the original screen vamp, experimenting with a coal-based mascara that some historians count as an ancestor of later products. She taught starlets how to make up for the camera. The film camera, like her salons, depended on things looking real when they were not.
Patrick O'Higgins, her secretary from 1951 until she died, recorded the principle behind all this in one exclamation from his employer, which he put in his 1971 memoir, Madame: An Intimate Biography of Helena Rubinstein:
— Helena Rubinstein, as recorded by Patrick O'HigginsGood publicity doesn't need too many facts!
The woman she had never seen
In 1922 she wrote to Rosa Hollay about a competitor:
— Helena Rubinstein, letter to Rosa Hollay, April 7, 1922I have never seen the woman, although she has been seen walking out of my place. I wouldn't be a bit surprised that she came to Grafton Street and had a course of treatments, and nobody knew who she was.
The woman was Elizabeth Arden, and the paranoia in that letter is a fair summary of a rivalry that lasted the rest of their lives. In the same letter Rubinstein called Hollay "a Sherlock Holmes" and suggested sending a Mrs. Lewis to Arden's premises for a treatment so she "could have a good look round." Four years earlier she had sent instructions that were almost doctrine: "Study everything the other party does." She was not talking about strategy in the abstract. She meant sending spies for facials.
Arden (1881–1966) was the mirror image of her rival, the other half of a pair. She had built her business on, as W magazine put it, "upper-class trappings and thoroughbred pastimes, as if looking attractive were a birthright." Her line on the subject, quoted in the same piece, was "Chic is Episcopalian." Rubinstein was a Jew from Kazimierz with a Yiddish accent she never lost, and in that phrase she could hear the door shutting. Her own pitch went the other way. The Jewish Museum's curator Mason Klein described it as challenging "the myth that beauty or taste is inborn." No woman was ugly, only lazy. That is a cruel line, but it is also a democratic one. If effort produced beauty, anyone could buy it.
Commercially, the two women were closer than their rhetoric suggested. Both bought celebrity endorsements, both priced high to signal value, and both sold pseudoscience in pastel jars. Rubinstein seems to have known this. Her best-known remark about Arden is half insult and half admission that they were partners in all but name: "With her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world."
As the money grew, the fighting became open. In 1933 Rubinstein hired Harry T. Johnson as sales director. In 1937 Arden hired him away, and one account says she took a general manager and eleven more staff along with him. Rubinstein's response was so neat it looks staged: she hired Arden's ex-husband. Then, in 1938, Rubinstein married a Georgian prince. Arden, not to be outdone, married a Russian one, and later divorced him.
Lindy Woodhead turned the rivalry into a book, War Paint (2003). The book became a musical, which opened at the Nederlander Theatre on Broadway on April 6, 2017, with Patti LuPone as Rubinstein and Christine Ebersole as Arden, and ran 269 performances. In the musical the two women do not meet until the end, and when they do they discover they have a great deal in common. The real record, as far as the sources go, contains only Rubinstein's 1922 sentence. She had never seen the woman, and she had built a counterintelligence operation to watch her anyway.
Selling herself, then buying herself back
By the late 1920s her marriage was failing, and the encyclopedia accounts agree on why: she could not cut back on her work. She kept an eighteen-hour day that she had started in Melbourne and never gave up. In her memoir she wrote that she was "confident and relaxed only in business." Titus was a man of letters with a Paris press and an interest in Kiki de Montparnasse, and he had married a woman who spent her days on liners between Europe and New York reading the newspapers for signs of trouble.
She did find trouble, or at least she said afterward that she had felt it coming. In December 1928 she sold the American business to Lehman Brothers for a reported $7.3 million, which The New Yorker put at roughly $84 million in today's money. One version says she sold it to save the marriage. Another says she sold it because she sensed something wrong under the decade's surface. Both could be true. What she did not sell was everything. She kept about 44 percent of the common stock.
The Crash came ten months later. The figures for the share price vary by source like everything else in her life. One gives $18 in 1929 falling to $2 by 1931. The New Yorker gives sixty dollars falling to three. Another gives a 1929 high of 26¼ collapsing to ⅛. All of them agree on the outline: Lehman had paid top price for a business it then managed, in The New Yorker's word, badly, and the Depression did the rest. Lehman had moved her products into mass distribution, wider and cheaper. That was a sensible plan in 1928 and a ruinous one by 1930. Her stake was losing value with everyone else's.
What she did next has been taught at Harvard Business School. She began writing to the shareholders, who were mostly women, and asked for their proxies. She bought every share that came onto the market. By 1931 she had regained control, reportedly 52 percent of the stock, for about $1.5 million by one careful estimate and under a million by others. Lehman, unable to manage the business and outvoted by the small holders she had courted, gave in. She had sold the company at the top and bought it back near the bottom, and the difference was a profit few people of either sex could have managed in 1931.
Her own account, in the memoir, puts the move on principle:
— Helena Rubinstein, My Life for BeautyDistribution had been expanded, and the new sales methods had vulgarized my products.
Cosmetics and Skin is skeptical. It notes that she "only objected to her products being repositioned in the volume market when the share price of the company collapsed." The skepticism is justified, and her argument still stands on its merits. Once she had the company back, she reversed Lehman's approach. In 1932 she set up trade zones that gave each authorized retailer a local monopoly, which cut price competition and restored some exclusivity. Each authorized dealer got a large color portrait of Madame to hang on the wall. The 1932 advertisements called the portrait the "Emblem of Authority." The label had come before the product in 1902. Thirty years later the founder's face was the warranty.
Restoring control did not restore profits right away, and the numbers from those years are sobering. Net profit was $500,200 in 1929, $415,961 in 1931, $120,904 in 1932, $182,408 in 1933, $159,357 in 1934, and a low of $56,494 in 1935. To turn things around she hired Johnson, lost him to Arden, and replaced him with Myer H. Katz in 1938. In 1937 she opened a school for demonstrators in the Fifth Avenue salon, starting with fifty women chosen from department stores in the United States and Canada. The plan was to repair the brand from the counter outward.
The overall verdict is still remarkable: she sold her company for millions, bought it back for a fraction of that, and eventually built it into a business worth about $100 million. The marriage did not survive. She and Titus divorced in 1937 or 1938, depending on the source. The business survived because she had kept 44 percent, which was enough to come back with.
Unimportant paintings by every important painter
When she returned to Paris after the First World War, she began buying art the way she had once bought lanolin, in bulk. She said so herself: her business had trained her to buy in quantity. A critic summed up the collection in a line whose condescension is almost a compliment: she owned "unimportant paintings by every important painter of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." She hung seven Renoirs above a single fireplace in her Park Avenue triplex. Modigliani, Chagall, Braque and Dufy sought her patronage. She was also, which the Jewish Museum's 2014 exhibition stressed, one of the earliest serious collectors of African and Oceanic sculpture, buying at a time when most of fashionable New York still classed those objects as ethnography.
Ruth Brandon described the New York living room as "tasteless but full of gusto." It had an acid-green carpet designed by Miró, twenty carved Victorian chairs covered in purple and magenta velvet, Chinese coffee tables inlaid with pearl, gold Turkish floor lamps, life-size Easter Island sculptures, six-foot blue opaline vases, African masks around the fireplace, and paintings covering every inch of wall. Klein put the same facts more charitably: she used her homes "to dramatically define and champion a multicultural identity and a nonhierarchical assessment of beauty." Both descriptions are accurate. The room was a manifesto, and it was also a jumble.
Her jewels were kept in a filing cabinet, sorted alphabetically: A for amethysts, B for beryls, D for diamonds. Another account has her once leaving a million dollars' worth of jewelry, some of which had belonged to Catherine I of Russia, in a cardboard box under her bed. In public she wore heavy jewelry, rubies with ruby lipstick and matching nail polish, and she carried her lunch in a brown paper bag. Trumble said she alternated between "great bouts of flamboyant extravagance" and "habitual meanness and penny-pinching." In 1924 she was writing to Hollay, "I wish to mercy you would economize somehow."
Above all, she collected portraits of herself: by Paul César Helleu in 1908, Raoul Dufy in 1930, Marie Laurencin in 1934, and Roberto Montenegro in 1941, in which she wears an enormous silver collar made for her by the Taxco silversmith William Spratling, adapted from a colonial halo in her own collection. Spratling's 1944 catalogue listed the piece as "Collar Rubenstein," number S137, misspelling her name in a catalogue of objects made in her honor. Salvador Dalí designed a powder compact for her and in 1943 painted her as Princess Artchil Gourielli-Helena Rubinstein. In another work he showed her chained to a rock with ropes of emeralds. Andy Warhol drew her in Kyoto in 1956. In 1957, after her last visit to Australia, William Dobell painted eight portraits of her. She found them "rather too much of a caricature," and then endowed a traveling scholarship for Australian artists anyway.
The most striking were Graham Sutherland's, three portraits painted in Paris. One shows her in a red brocade Balenciaga gown, heavily made up and loaded with jewels. Sutherland said she looked like an empress. Trumble, who acquired the painting for Australia's National Portrait Gallery in 2015, agreed: "even if only an empress of face cream." She described the series in her memoir with an honesty she did not often allow herself:
incredibly bold, domineering interpretations of what I had never imagined I looked like … as paintings they were indeed masterpieces.
Trumble is the rare secondary figure in her story who came to it through a picture rather than a jar. He described himself as "an unmarried gay male white Anglo-Saxon Protestant art historian" with little knowledge of cosmetics. The Sutherland, he wrote, was the acquisition he expected to define his career, and it drew him from the empress on canvas back to the waitress in Melbourne, through ships' manifests and naturalisation files. He died in October 2022, just after finishing the book, which was published the next year. He spent the end of his life peeling her stories away, and he started by falling for the most elaborate one.
Her salons were galleries too, and the 1915 Frankl rooms were only the beginning. The later spa at 715 Fifth Avenue had a restaurant, a gymnasium and Miró rugs. Inspired, as the Jewish Museum's catalogue argued, by the European literary salon, she meant her rooms as places where a woman could become someone else. Klein, who curated Beauty Is Power, wrote that "through carefully considered publicity, she made her personal aesthetic taste an integral feature of her business." His catalogue, Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power, is the best record of how the art and the commerce fed each other: the art was publicity, the publicity was the brand, and the brand paid for more art.
Then there was 625 Park Avenue. One story says she tried to buy a triplex there and was turned away because she was Jewish. She responded by buying the whole building. The story is repeated more often than it is documented, which suits her well enough. The other story about her Jewishness is better attested and stranger. In the 1950s she traveled everywhere with Patrick O'Higgins, half a century younger than she was, who had become her companion. She took him to a state dinner with David Ben-Gurion. The Israeli prime minister asked, "Who's your goy?" She answered: "That's Patrick! And . . . and, yes, he is my goy."
Her identity was not simple. One account says she did not attend synagogue, kept her distance from Jewish causes, and made disparaging remarks about "Jewish taste," while still always calling herself a Jew and remaining sensitive to antisemitism. At a lunch with Edith Sitwell, told that Sitwell's ancestors had burned Joan of Arc, she said: "Somebody had to do it!" Taking Ben-Hur in on a date with O'Higgins, she pronounced the film "Most interesting! I'm glad the Jewish boy won!"
Princess Gourielli, sponsor
In 1938 she married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, born in Georgia on February 18, 1895, and therefore twenty-three years younger than his bride, or twenty by other counts. His claim to the Gourielli title came through his grandmother's side. The marriage gave her a name she had not invented herself, and she promptly put it on a product. In the 1940s she launched the House of Gourielli for Men, with fragrances, a men's barbershop and a boutique, introduced, according to one account, with a ticker-tape send-off down Wall Street. It lost money and closed in the 1950s, decades ahead of the men's grooming market. It was one of the few failures she could not price her way out of.
The same year she and the prince settled permanently in New York, and with Europe's Jews in mortal danger the princess's title was put to more serious use.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum holds one typed affidavit dated May 27, 1941. In it Helena Rubinstein, president of Helena Rubinstein, Inc., signing herself Gourielli, supports the immigration of Rubin and Dina Lewinson, then in Cannes. The affidavit lists other refugees she was already sponsoring and describes the means she had to support them if they were given American visas. The Lewinsons never reached the United States, but they survived the war. The archive's catalogue entry, in a slip that might have amused her, describes the affiant as "born Helena Gourielli." In the archive, at least, she was born a princess.
The evidence of what else she did is scattered, but it points the same way: she helped Polish Jews get out of Europe and gave some of them jobs in her salons. A grandniece of one recipient donated the affidavit. It is the one document in her career where the name on the paper existed for someone else's benefit.
The war years were also good for business. She kept her American factories at full capacity and launched products as if peace were assured. In 1939 she introduced a waterproof mascara, licensed that year from the Austrian singer Helene Winterstein-Kambersky, with an aquatic ballet at the World's Fair, making the product's claim visible underwater. In 1941 she launched her third perfume, Heaven Sent, in New York by releasing 5,000 balloons carrying messages and samples. In the postwar boom, department stores sold 466 preparations under her name. At one count the company offered sixty-two creams, seventy-eight powders, forty-six perfumes, colognes and eaux de toilette, sixty-nine lotions and a hundred and fifteen lipsticks, plus soaps, rouges and eye shadows.
She gave money to Israel, founded the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and funded scholarships for Israeli students. A newsreel shows her cutting the ribbon on a cosmetics factory at Migdal HaEmek, talking with the trade minister Pinchas Sapir and the actress Hanna Rovina. In 1953 she set up the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, originally to fund health, medical research and rehabilitation, and stated its premise in one sentence:
My fortune comes from women and should benefit them and their children to better their quality of life.
She believed it, and it was also true as a matter of bookkeeping. Women had paid six shillings a jar since Collins Street. In 1930 women shareholders had handed her their proxies. And women in the next generation would collect the foundation's checks.
Meetings in a Lucite bed
Prince Gourielli died in New York on November 21, 1955. Her younger son, Horace, died on May 18, 1958. She did not slow down. That is the line every biographer uses, and it is accurate. It is also not quite the whole story.
That decade she was still launching products: vitamin A creams in 1954, and in 1958 creams, oils, lotions and foundations containing hormones, chiefly estrogen. The Food and Drug Administration, newly empowered by the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, began policing the more elaborate claims and restricting some ingredients. She was, as one account puts it, not pleased. In 1958 she also introduced Mascara-Matic, the first refillable tube mascara with a built-in brush, enriched with silk fibers and renamed Long Lash in 1964. That small engineering idea has outlasted every one of her hormone claims.
In 1957 she made her last trip to Australia. Dobell painted her. The next year, when she was back in Melbourne staying at the Menzies Hotel, a man named Abel Isaacson came to see her, saying he had known her in the early Melbourne days. The account I have breaks off at that point. Who he was, what he wanted and how she received him I cannot say, and that seems right: someone from before the label turned up in her hotel and the record goes blank.
In 1959 she represented the American cosmetics industry at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Russian women crowded her pavilion for the demonstrations. A Jewish girl from Austrian Galicia, who had once called herself Russian to American customers, now represented America to the Russians.
In her last years she ran the empire from bed. The bed was framed in Lucite, a clear modern plastic, and she held board meetings in her bedroom. Her own beauty routines, the ones she prescribed to millions of women, she never followed, and she said she had no time for them. In 1964 she finished My Life for Beauty. The title is ambiguous, perhaps intentionally: a life spent on beauty, or a life given up for it. The Jewish Women's Archive notes that late in life she "expressed numerous doubts about the wisdom of her absorption in her career," and blamed it for painful personal costs. One fragment from the Hollay letters, written decades earlier, survives only in a truncated auction catalogue: "life isn't really worth living the way I live but am always" — and there it stops.
She died in New York on April 1, 1965, at ninety-two, or ninety-four, or ninety-five, depending on which year of birth you accept. Time headlined its obituary "The Beauty Merchant." The New York Times later called her "probably the greatest female American entrepreneur of all." Michèle Fitoussi, whose biography Helena Rubinstein: The Woman Who Invented Beauty is the most complete modern account, estimates her personal fortune at about $100 million. The brand operated in more than thirty countries, with fourteen factories and 32,000 employees.
The name without the face
In 1966 a large part of her estate was auctioned at Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York: the African and Oceanic sculpture, the Lucite furniture, and the Victorian chairs in purple velvet. The collection she had used as a portrait of herself was dispersed among buyers who had not lived in it.
Selling the company took longer, and it is a sad story. Colgate-Palmolive bought it in 1973. Albi International bought it in 1980. In 1984 L'Oréal bought the Japanese and Latin American divisions, and in 1988 it bought the rest. The New York Times headline that October read: "L'Oreal buys Rubinstein in shrouded deal."
L'Oréal's founder, Eugène Schueller, was the son of an Alsatian pastry cook who paid part of his son's school fees by supplying the lycée with pastries. He studied chemistry, created the first safe permanent hair dye, and named his company first L'Auréole, after an Edwardian hairstyle, and then L'Oréal. He made his fortune from women and did not approve of them working. In one of his magazines he wrote that "a home for a man means a wife at home." During the war he collaborated with the occupiers in Paris when it served his business. The man who arranged the Rubinstein takeover, Jacques Corrèze, had been active in seizing Jewish property in Paris. When the deal closed, Rubinstein's company still had a manufacturing plant in Israel, and the Arab League responded by boycotting all L'Oréal products. Corrèze was put in charge of negotiating with the Arab governments.
So the name of a Jewish woman from Kazimierz, who in 1941 had signed affidavits for refugees stuck in Cannes, ended up owned by a company whose founder had worked with the occupiers and whose deal had been put together by a man who had taken Jewish property. It is hard to say anything about that which improves on the facts.
By 1985 the brand was effectively gone from American shelves. L'Oréal tried to bring it back in late 1999 with an 8,000-square-foot spa and store at 135 Prince Street in SoHo, then a few counters at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks, about ten in all. In June 2003 Jean-Paul Agon, head of L'Oréal USA, was asked whether a brand with that history could appeal to modern customers. "It's probably one of our most difficult challenges," he said. On July 31, 2003, L'Oréal closed Helena Rubinstein in the United States and promised to find positions for most of the thirty-two staff. An outgoing executive explained that making the brand viable "would take too many resources for too long a period." Thirty-two employees, in the country where she had once employed thousands.
The brand did not die. It moved. L'Oréal repositioned it as ultra-premium skin care just as Chinese demand for luxury skin care was taking off. Distribution in Japan predated the 1980s, and the brand entered China in the 2000s, then South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Thailand, with Singapore and Malaysia announced in 2024. L'Oréal's chief executive, Nicolas Hieronimus, has called it "one of the greatest success stories — or transformation stories — inside L'Oréal." It is on track to become a billion-dollar brand. Its flagship line, Replasty, developed since 2008 with a Swiss clinic, Laclinic-Montreux, is sold with the pseudo-medical language of "pre- and post-procedure" care. The company's motto, attributed to her, is "Beauty is nothing without Science." The diagnosis-and-prescription method of Collins Street now runs on clinical studies, sixty-six of them since 2009, according to the brand. She would have recognized all of it except the absence from America.
The foundation ran until 2011 and gave away nearly $130 million, mostly to education, the arts and community groups in New York City, including years of children's programming on public television station WNET. In its last year it gave the City University of New York $2 million to endow scholarships for continuing-education students. One recipient, a woman studying social services, wrote: "You want to hear something funny: the first cosmetic I used in Colombia as a teenager was a Helena Rubinstein!"
She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens, in the same borough as the Rawson Street factory, where the creams marketed as "direct from Paris" were actually made. The headstone gives her year of birth as 1870, two years earlier than she was born. It is the last label, cut in granite, and it is the only one of her fictions that made her older.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to separate the method from the myth, though with Rubinstein they can never be fully separated. Some of these principles are admirable. Others are a cautionary record of what worked in an unregulated industry and would not survive an FDA inquiry or a consumer lawsuit today. Each one rests on documented decisions. None of them depends on the twelve jars.
The principles
- 1.Sell the diagnosis, not the jar.
- 2.Treat price as a claim about quality.
- 3.Make the founder the warranty.
- 4.Manufacture where it's cheap; mythologize where it's dear.
- 5.When the gate is closed, compound your way through it.
- 6.Build the org chart from people who can't defect.
- 7.Turn the premises into the press release.
- 8.Sell at the top, but keep the option to return.
- 9.Ration distribution to defend the price.
- 10.Study the rival obsessively, from a distance.
- 11.Launch with a spectacle that proves the claim.
- 12.A brand built on a face must plan for the face's absence.
Principle 1
Sell the diagnosis, not the jar
The Collins Street salon did not sell face cream. It sold a consultation that ended with face cream as its conclusion. A woman came in, was examined, sometimes under a light that showed every flaw, was "diagnosed," and was given a "prescription." The skin-type framework of dry, oily, combination and sensitive, which she was among the first to formalize around 1910, turned that consultation into a system that could be taught. Once a skin had a type, it needed a regimen, and a regimen meant several products.
This structure did more than raise the size of each sale. It shifted authority. A customer who buys a jar is choosing. A customer who receives a prescription is complying. The diagnosis also costs little to repeat and is hard to argue with, because the customer's own face is the evidence.
Today's luxury version, L'Oréal's "Skin Tech Interventions" with personal skin consultants, is the 1902 salon with better equipment.
Tactic: Design your first customer interaction as an assessment whose output is a personalized bundle, so the product arrives as the answer to a question the customer already accepted.
Principle 2
Treat price as a claim about quality
Valaze cost tenpence to fill and sold for six shillings, more than seven times its cost, to women for whom it was a meaningful share of a week's pay. When a product sold slowly, Brandon reports, Rubinstein did not discount it. She raised the price.
The reasoning is specific to markets where the buyer cannot check the result. You cannot measure a face cream against a control face. Without proof, buyers fall back on signals, and price is the loudest signal available. A cheap anti-aging cream advertises its own doubt. An expensive one implies that someone stands behind it.
The lesson has a limit. Price works as a claim only when the product is good enough not to undercut the signal. The ADB, which is skeptical of her marketing, concedes that "the products were of high quality."
Tactic: In categories where outcomes can't be verified, test a price increase before you test a discount, and watch whether the lift in perceived value outpaces any loss in volume.
Principle 3
Make the founder the warranty
Dr. Lykusky was useful until her own name was worth more than his. By 1913 he was fading from the labels. By the American years "Dr. Lykuski's Blackhead and Open Pore Cure" had become "Valaze Blackhead and Open Pore Paste," and in time Valaze gave way to Helena Rubinstein. In 1932 the founder's color portrait, hung on the wall of every authorized dealer, was the "Emblem of Authority." W summed it up: "There was no daylight between her and her brand."
The portraits by Dalí, Sutherland, Laurencin and Warhol were not vanity in the usual sense. They were brand assets, each one certifying that the person behind the products was someone of note. Her flawless skin, which she was born with and did not get from a jar, she let customers credit to the jar.
The method is effective, and its cost comes later, as Principle 12 describes.
Tactic: If your company sells something whose quality can't be inspected, put a specific, visible, accountable person on the label, and invest in making that person legible.
Principle 4
Manufacture where it's cheap; mythologize where it's dear
Lanolin came from the merinos of the Western District, and the story came from the Carpathians. The creams were made in Flinders Lane and sold as European. Later they were made at 208 Rawson Street, Long Island City, and sold as "direct from Paris," which also saved her the import duties. During the war she was Russian, not Viennese.
Every time, she separated the cost structure from the story, and the profit came from the difference between them. The approach is still the basis of most luxury goods. Its limits are worth noting, though. The FDA eventually caught up with her medical claims, and the Carpathian herbs never survived examination by historians. Provenance claims were her best margin and her weakest point.
H
The Provenance Gap
Where the product came from versus where she said it came from.
| Product / claim | Stated origin | Documented origin | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crème Valaze | "Rare herbs" of the Carpathians; Dr. Lykuski | Lanolin, wax, scent; Felton Grimwade, Flinders Lane | Myth |
| American line, from 1916 | "Direct from Paris" | 208 Rawson St., Long Island City | Implied |
| The founder | Viennese, then Russian; medical training | Kraków; unfinished schooling | Myth |
| Waterproof mascara, 1939 | Rubinstein innovation | Licensed from Helene Winterstein-Kambersky | Licensed |
| Mascara-Matic, 1958 | First refillable tube with brush | Product credited to the company | Real |
Tactic: Locate production for cost and the story for desire, but make sure the claim at the center of your brand is one you could defend in front of a regulator.
Principle 5
When the gate is closed, compound your way through it
Banks did not lend to women, so she could not borrow her way to London. She funded each expansion out of the previous one: Melbourne paid for Sydney, Australia paid for London, London paid for Paris. The £100 from Thompson in 1902 was, as far as the record shows, the last outside capital she needed for years.
That constraint gave her something leveraged founders lack: nobody could take the business away from her. With no creditors and no syndicate, she had no one to answer to. Her later willingness to sell to Lehman, and her ability to buy the company back, came from three decades of owning it outright. The trade-off was speed, since each new territory had to wait until the last one paid off. On the timeline that follows, though, the waits look shorter than you might expect.
Tactic: If outside capital is unavailable or costly, sequence your markets so each one is profitable enough to fund the next, and treat that discipline as protection of your control, not a handicap.
Principle 6
Build the org chart from people who can't defect
Ceska ran Melbourne, Manka ran London, Pauline ran Paris. Mala came at eighteen and stayed fifty years. Oscar Kolin became chairman. Roy joined the business. In an industry where Arden could hire away a sales director and eleven staff in one move, as one account says she did in 1937, a sister could not go over to the competition.
The family structure had real costs, as family businesses usually do: quarrels, favoritism, and a bench of successors who were loyal more than they were ambitious. By the 1950s Mala was the only relative with any interest in running the empire, which explains much of how the company was sold off after 1965. For the first forty years, though, the family solved the problem every multinational founder faces: how to trust a manager on another continent when a letter takes weeks to arrive.
Tactic: For roles where a defection would be fatal, prefer people whose interests are bound to yours by something stronger than salary, such as equity, history or kinship, and plan their succession explicitly.
Principle 7
Turn the premises into the press release
In 1915 Paul Frankl designed the first New York salon in dark-blue cloth and rose silk, with an Elie Nadelman bas-relief on the wall. The press wrote about it as an art event, which cost her nothing. The 715 Fifth Avenue spa had Miró rugs, a restaurant and a gym. Her apartments were galleries, and the galleries appeared in the society pages.
Her collecting has been dismissed as tasteless, which it sometimes was, but as a marketing expense it was close to perfect. Each painting enhanced the brand, appreciated in value, and produced coverage she did not pay for. Cosmetics and Skin calls it the "stratagem" she "would repeat in the future, using her growing art collection to generate free publicity." The Jewish Museum's 2014 exhibition showed the strategy was still producing headlines fifty years after her death.
Tactic: Put part of your marketing budget into physical spaces and objects that the press will cover on their own merits, so every visit is also a story.
Principle 8
Sell at the top, but keep the option to return
The Lehman transaction is the clearest piece of judgment in her career, and it was probably part luck. She sold the American business in December 1928 for $7.3 million and kept 44 percent of the common stock. When the Crash and Lehman's move into mass distribution brought the stock down to a few dollars a share, she wrote to the scattered small shareholders, most of them women, gathered their proxies, bought shares on the open market, and regained a reported 52 percent for around $1.5 million.
The retained stake was what made the comeback possible. Without the 44 percent she would have been an outside bidder for a damaged asset. With it she was a large holder who could campaign for control. The proxy campaign itself shows good audience instinct: she treated the women who owned her stock the same way she treated the women who bought her cream.
L
The Lehman Round-Trip
Sale, collapse, and recapture, 1928–1931.
Dec 1928
Sells the American business to Lehman Brothers for a reported $7.3 million; retains ~44% of common stock.
1929
Net profit $500,200. Lehman expands distribution into the volume market. The market crashes in October.
1930–31
Shares collapse (one record: $18 to $2). Rubinstein solicits proxies from mostly female shareholders and buys on the open market.
1931
Regains control, a reported 52%, for roughly $1.5 million.
1932
Reinstates exclusive trade zones; introduces the "Emblem of Authority" portrait for authorized dealers.
1935
Net profit bottoms at $56,494 before the long rebuild to a ~$100 million company.
Tactic: When you sell, keep a meaningful minority stake and stay close to your other shareholders, because the best acquisition you ever make may be your own company at a distressed price.
Principle 9
Ration distribution to defend the price
Lehman's error, as she saw it, was spreading the product too widely, into channels where it was discounted and, in her word, "vulgarized." Her first move after taking control in 1932 was to restore exclusive trade zones that gave each authorized retailer a local monopoly. Price-cutting fell, and the products became scarcer and therefore more desirable.
The skeptical reading of her motives, that she objected to mass distribution only once the share price fell, does not weaken the principle. Luxury depends on being hard to get. A price signal (Principle 2) means nothing if the same jar is marked down two blocks away. Distribution is part of pricing. In 1937 she added a training school for demonstrators in the Fifth Avenue salon, so that the counters she did allow were staffed to her standard.
Tactic: Treat every new distribution channel as a pricing decision, and give authorized sellers enough exclusivity that they have a reason to protect your margin.
Principle 10
Study the rival obsessively, from a distance
"Study everything the other party does," she wrote to Rosa Hollay in December 1918. Four years later she proposed sending a Mrs. Lewis into Arden's salon for a treatment and a good look around, while admitting, "I have never seen the woman." It is competitive intelligence of the most personal kind, and she ran it for half a century.
Studying the rival did not mean copying her. Arden's line was that "chic is Episcopalian," with beauty as an upper-class birthright. Rubinstein took the opposite position: no woman was ugly, only lazy, and beauty could be earned and bought. The two businesses were tactically similar and philosophically opposed, which let each serve customers the other put off. Her one admission ("with her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world") shows she knew exactly where Arden was better.
A
Rubinstein vs. Arden
Twin empires, opposite theories of beauty.
| Dimension | Helena Rubinstein | Elizabeth Arden |
|---|---|---|
| Theory of beauty | Earned: "no ugly women, only lazy ones" | Inherited: "Chic is Episcopalian" |
| Claimed edge | Product and science | Packaging (by Rubinstein's own admission) |
| Brand register | Modernist, eclectic, art-saturated | Upper-class trappings, thoroughbred pastimes |
| Shared tactics | Celebrity endorsement, premium pricing, pseudoscientific claims | |
| Talent war | Hired Arden's ex-husband | Hired away sales director Harry T. Johnson (1937) |
Tactic: Run a standing, specific intelligence effort on your main competitor, and use what you learn to sharpen your difference, not to imitate.
Principle 11
Launch with a spectacle that proves the claim
The waterproof mascara was introduced at an aquatic ballet in 1939. Heaven Sent went up on 5,000 balloons in 1941. In Paris in 1912 she offered free Swedish massages to the city's most-quoted women, and Colette started talking. The best of her launches did more than draw attention. They showed the product working: mascara that holds up underwater, a perfume called "heaven sent" arriving from the sky.
That separates a stunt from a demonstration. A stunt gets noticed. A demonstration gets noticed and also persuades, because the spectacle and the product claim are the same event. The free massage for Colette was a demonstration of the purest kind, with a famous writer as the subject.
Tactic: Design launches in which the event itself shows the product's main promise, so that coverage of the event works as proof.
Principle 12
A brand built on a face must plan for the face's absence
Her biggest strength became her biggest structural flaw. After merging herself with the brand (the portrait as "Emblem of Authority," the products named for her, her own skin as the advertisement), she left nothing that could stand without her. After 1965 the company was sold to Colgate in 1973, Albi in 1980 and L'Oréal by 1988. It disappeared from American shelves by 1985 and failed again with the 2003 SoHo closure, where Agon called the revival "one of our most difficult challenges."
The brand did recover, but only after leaving the market where her persona had been built and repositioning as clinical, ultra-premium skin care for Asian customers who had no memory of Madame and no particular feeling about her. In practice the turnaround required rebuilding the brand without her.
Founder-centered brands work best when the founder is present to sustain them. The playbook needs a second chapter about how the brand runs when the founder is gone. She never wrote it, and her heirs had to work it out.
Tactic: If your brand is built on your persona, start early to encode it in things that don't need you, such as standards, rituals, product principles and successors who want the job, while you are still around to shape them.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Helena RubinsteinThere are no ugly women, only lazy ones.
— Helena Rubinstein, on Elizabeth ArdenWith her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world.
— Helena Rubinstein, letter to Rosa Hollay, December 12, 1914It does cost a fortune to start here but our place will be the very best and very smartest.
— Helena Rubinstein, on founding the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, 1953My fortune comes from women and should benefit them and their children to better their quality of life.
— Helena Rubinstein, My Life for Beauty, on Graham Sutherland's portraitsIncredibly bold, domineering interpretations of what I had never imagined I looked like.
Maxims
- Print the label first. A name, a story and a price can come before the product, and they often determine what the product becomes.
- Diagnose, then prescribe. A customer who accepts your assessment will buy your solution as a set.
- Price is a sentence. In markets where results can't be checked, what you charge tells buyers what you think the product is worth.
- Be your own warranty. When the founder is the label, every portrait is advertising and every public appearance is a product demonstration.
- Cheap inputs, dear stories. The margin is the distance between where the cream is made and where the customer believes it comes from, so keep the claim at the center defensible.
- Fund the next room from the last one. Being shut out of credit can protect your control if you expand only as fast as your profits allow.
- Keep a stake in what you sell. A retained minority is what made it possible to buy the company back at a fraction of the price.
- Scarcity is a channel decision. Every discount counter you allow weakens the price you set.
- Watch the rival, not the mirror. Study a competitor closely so you can sharpen your difference, not erase it.
- Plan for your own absence. A brand built on one face has to be taught, before it's too late, how to operate without that face.
