Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein; December 25, 1872 – April 1, 1965) was a Polish businesswoman, art collector, and philanthropist. She founded Helena Rubinstein Incorporated cosmetics company, which ultimately made her one of the world's wealthiest women.

Early life

Rubinstein was the eldest of eight daughters born to Polish Jews, Gitel Scheindel "Augusta" Rubinstein née Silberfeld and Naftali Herz "Horace" Rubinstein, a shopkeeper in Kraków, Lesser Poland. Helena was born into the Kazimierz district of Kraków, then part of Austria-Hungary following the partitions of Poland. She was the cousin of the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber and of Ruth Rappaport's mother.

Move to Australia Rubinstein emigrated with no financial security and little command of the English language from Poland to Australia in 1896 after declining an arranged marriage. She found accommodation with her uncle in Coleraine, in the Western Victoria region, an area with sheep-farming industry that produced lanolin, one of the ingredients of the face creams she had brought with her from Poland. She developed the idea to use lavender, pine bark, and water lilies to mask the lanolin's pungent odor in the creams she began to produce herself. Rubinstein experimented with her stylish clothes and milky complexion, which did not pass unnoticed among the town's ladies; however, she soon found enthusiastic buyers for the jars of beauty cream in her luggage. She spotted a market where she began to make her own. A key ingredient of the cream, lanolin, was readily at hand.

After a disagreement with her uncle and a period employed as a governess, Helena began working as a waitress at the Winter Garden tearooms in Melbourne. There, she secured funding from an admirer to invest in the production and launch of a face cream called Crème Valaze. She subsequently opened a Salon in Collins Street in Melbourne.

Her business expanded to Sydney within five years, generating enough revenue to fund a salon called "Salon de Beauté Valaze" in London. In 1908, her sister Ceska took over the Management of the Melbourne Salon, allowing Helena to relocate to London to expand internationally. She financed the move herself, since women were not yet allowed to obtain business loans from banks .

Marriage and children – London and Paris In 1908, Helena married the Polish-born American journalist Edward William Titus in London. They had two sons, Roy Valentine Titus (London, December 12, 1909 – New York, June 18, 1989) and Horace Titus (London, April 23, 1912 – New York, May 18, 1958). The family eventually moved to Paris where she opened a salon in 1912. Her husband helped with the salon's publicity material and set up a small publishing house, subsequently publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover and hiring Samuel Putnam to translate famous model Alice Prin's (Kiki de Montparnasse) memoirs, Kiki's Memoirs.

Move to the United States

Rubinstein and Titus relocated to New York City at the outbreak of World War I, where she opened a cosmetics salon in 1915, the forerunner of a chain throughout the country. During that period, she competed openly with another successful female cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden. The two businesses pursued similar business strategies, seeking celebrity endorsement, perceived value of overpricing and marketing claims anchored pseudoscience of skincare. The rivalry with Arden lasted all her life. Rubinstein said of her rival, "With her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world."

From 1917, Rubinstein took on the manufacturing and wholesale distribution of her products directly. In 1928, she sold the American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million, ($127 million in 2022). Following the onset of the Great Depression, she repurchased the company's stock, by then greatly reduced in value, for under $1 million and later grew the company's value to $100 million, with salons and outlets operating in nearly a dozen US cities.

This period of Rubinstein's early business career, has been the subject of a recent Harvard Business School case.

Her subsequent spa at 715 Fifth Avenue included a restaurant, a gymnasium and rugs by painter Joan Miró. She commissioned Spanish artist Salvador Dalí to design a powder compact as well a portrait of herself in 1943, titled Princess Arthchild Gourielle-Helena Rubinstein. American artist Andy Warhol drew a stylized portrait of Rubinstein in Kyoto, Japan in 1956. Other artists who painted her portrait were Graham Sutherland in 1957 for the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, now in the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Marie Laurencin in 1934 (now in the National Portrait Gallery (United States), Raoul Dufy (1930), Roberto Montenegro (1941). After Rubinstein's last visit to Australia, William Dobell painted a series of eight portraits in 1957.

The 1941 Montenegro portrait showed Rubinstein wearing a monumental silver pectoral made specifically for her by the Taxco designer William Spratling. The necklace, adapted from a colonial halo in Rubinstein's collection, became known as the Helena Rubinstein Necklace. Rubinstein collected numerous Spratling pieces and visited him at his home in Acapulco. In 1953, she established the philanthropic Helena Rubinstein Foundation to provide funds to organizations specializing in health, medical research and rehabilitation. Some of her estate, including African and fine art, Lucite furniture, and Victorian furniture upholstered in purple, was auctioned in 1966 at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in New York City.

One of Rubinstein's numerous sayings was: "There are no ugly women, only lazy ones." A scholarly study of her exclusive beauty salons and how they blurred and influenced the conceptual boundaries at the time among fashion, art galleries, the domestic interior and versions of modernism is explored by Marie J. Clifford. A feature-length documentary film, The Powder & the Glory (2009) by Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman, details the rivalry between Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden.

In 1973, the company Helena Rubinstein, Inc. was sold to Colgate-Palmolive. By the 1980s the brand had grealy declined in the US market. In 1984 it was acquired by L'Oréal. . Jacques Corrèze, who engineered the takeover, has a past being active in expropriating Jewish property in Paris. The brand was re-launched in the US market in 1999 but without much commercial success despite good performance in Asia, Europe, and South America. The US operation was therefore closed down in 2003. Since 2011, L'Oréal has been repositioning the brand as an ultra-premium skin care franchise. As of 2023, high-end Helena Rubinstein products remain unavailable in the US but are sold in international markets. The foundation was a longtime supporter of children's programming for New York City's PBS affiliate WNET.

The Manhattan Jewish Museum hosted the exhibition "Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power", the first museum show devoted to Rubinstein, from October 31, 2014, until March 22, 2015.

Support for the arts A one-off Rubinstein Mural Prize was awarded in 1958 to Erica McGilchrist for her work in the Women's College, University of Melbourne, and a Helena Rubinstein Scholarship was awarded to Frank Hodgkinson in 1958 and Charles Blackman 1960.

The Helena Rubinstein Portrait Prize was an annual prize of £300 for portraiture by an Australian artist, and was mostly staged at the Claude Hotchin Gallery in Western Australia.

In popular culture Based on Woodhead's book, the 2016 musical War Paint dramatizes her rivalry with competitor Elizabeth Arden. After a run Chicago's Goodman Theatre, the show opened on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre on April 6, 2017, starring Patti LuPone as Rubinstein and Christine Ebersole as Arden.

The comedy Lip Service by the Australian dramatist John Misto chronicles the life and career of Rubinstein and her rivalry with Elizabeth Arden and Revlon. Lip Service premiered April 26, 2017, at the Park Theatre in London, under the title Madame Rubinstein, before opening at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre in August of the same year. Miriam Margolyes starred as Rubinstein.