From Australia’s Jewish Past: Helena Rubinstein – an young Jewish entrepreneur who created a beauty empire
Helena was born on 25 December 1870. She was the eldest of eight daughters born to Polish Jews – Augusta and Horace Rubinstein.
Helena Rubinstein
After refusing an arranged marriage, she emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1896 with no money and little English. Her mother, worried she wouldn’t have enough face cream, packed a dozen little pots into Helena’s luggage. She had an uncle who owned a grocery store in Coleraine, Victoria, and this is where she began her Australian life and as a salesgirl. There was certainly nothing in her life to suggest that she would build an empire around beauty.
Her stylish clothes, soft clear complexion and feisty personality instantly appealed to women who were keen to learn her beauty tips. Realising that she had a secret knowledge within her attributes, she thought about recreating the formula of the face cream she had always used as well as teaching women the rules of beauty.
A key ingredient of the cream was lanolin and this was readily at hand. Coleraine, in the Western Victoria region, was not the most perfect place for Helena to start her business but it was the home to some 75 million sheep who secreted abundant quantities of lanolin. In order to disguise the lanolin’s very strong odour, Helena experimented with lavender, pine bark, and water lilies. She pursued her goal through trial and error, eventually finding the right formula. From here she began to dispense her first beauty tips – protecting skin from sun and wind, moisturising the skin and assist with restorative sleep.
Whilst she was working on the formula, she had a falling out with her uncle which necessitated a change in her line of work to that of a bush governess which she did for a period before moving to Melbourne where she began waitressing at the Winter Garden Tearooms. She met an admirer through the tearooms who was willing to provide the funds to launch her “Crème Valaze” – including herbs imported “from the ‘’Carpathian Mountains“. The cream cost ten pence to make and sold for six shillings. With her customer-base growing, she was soon able to afford to open a salon in Collins Street – quite the fashionable part of Melbourne at that time as well as today – and began selling glamour as a science to customers whose skin was “diagnosed” and a suitable treatment “prescribed”.
In 1902, she moved to Sydney to open a salon and with her operations proving to be profitable enough in Australia, she was able to open a Salon de Beauté Valaze – House of Beauty – in London. Helena had invented something totally new: a sanctuary dedicated to beauty, skincare and aesthetic treatments, as well as a showcase for Valaze – her earliest moisturising cream for dry skin. In 1908 she expanded the operation and one of her sisters had come from Poland to manage the Melbourne salon. With the equivalent of AUD100,000 (in today’s currency), Helena moved to London and began what was to become an international enterprise. Women at this time could not obtain bank loans, so the money was very much her own.
In London, she found that English women’s skin concerns were different from those of Australian women, so in 1912 she established the first system for classifying skin by type and providing specific skincare tailored to each of them – a revolutionary approach for that era. Her name and products soon became one of the first and most productive cosmetic companies in the world.
Her focus on beauty rapidly expanded to become more of an overall life aesthetic and, whilst so involved in her business, she found time to enjoy painting, jewellery, fashion, architecture, furniture and interior design.
In 1908, Helena married a Polish-born American journalist Edward William Titus in London. They had two sons, and the family moved on to Paris in 1912 where she opened her next salon. Edward helped with writing the publicity, produced the advertisements and from there went on to set up a small publishing house – one of his successes was publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Helena mixed in the art and glamour world and rubbed shoulders with artists including Joan Miró and even commissioned artist Salvador Dalí to design a powder compact as well a portrait of herself.
Her focus on beauty rapidly expanded to become more of an overall life aesthetic. She opened a factory in Saint Cloud, France where she worked with a team of chemists to develop more complex creams that would protect skin from the effects of ageing. By this time, three of her sisters had joined her in Paris and she continued to support her family financially in Poland. In 1914, just prior to the First World War, the family moved to New York where she opened her first American salon. New York was a perfect city for Helena and her growing enterprising business, giving her the opportunity to mingle art and fashion with skincare and beauty. It was an instant hit and the brand’s name soon spread across America. However, this was at a time when the start of vicious rivalry with another cosmetic entrepreneur by the name and branding of Elizabeth Arden began. Helena said of her rival, “With her packaging and my product, we could have ruled the world.” Interestingly, both women died within eighteen months of each other and both were known as social climbers. A documentary film, The Powder and the Glory (2009) by Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman, details the rivalry between Helena and Elizabeth.
Amazingly Helena’s business survived the 1929 Wall Street Crash and two World Wars. She did not sit still and continued to pioneer many ideas linking nutrition and beauty, whereby she introduced more skincare products for both men and women, as well as being the first in her field to open a beauty institute and to employ beauty advisors. In 1928 Helena sold the business to Lehman Brothers for US7.3 million. In 2007 it was sold for US88 million. After the onset of the Great Depression, she bought back the nearly worthless stock for less than US$1 million, eventually increasing the value of the company to US$100 million, and went on to establish salons and outlets in almost a dozen US cities.
Her first marriage did not last due to her persistently unfaithful husband and they were divorced in 1937. A year later, she married an impoverished Russian prince who was twenty-three years her junior. Eager for a regal title, Helena pursued the handsome man handsomely and named a male cosmetics line after her youthful prized catch.
She was most philanthropic and there are many foundations, organisations, galleries and scholarships bearing her name or that she was associated with. She had a great affiliation with Israel and established the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and the America-Israel Cultural Foundation, which provided scholarships to Israelis. The Helena Rubinstein Foundation, between 1953 and 2011 distributed nearly US$130 million primarily to education, arts, health and medical research, as well as to community-based organisations.
She established the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship and the Helena Rubinstein Portrait Prize to be awarded annually to an Australian Artist. There is also an L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science – known as the Helena Rubinstein Women in Science Award. The Manhattan Jewish Museum hosted the exhibition “Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power” between 2014 and 2015.
Helena died on 1 April 1965, at the age of ninety-three, and was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens USA. One of her numerous sayings was: “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones.” The cosmetics empire she built is now owned by L’Oreal – which caused a great deal of scandal as the company founder Eugene Schueller had been an enthusiastic collaborator during the Second World War, and in its aftermath, L’Oreal became notorious for employing ex-Nazis on the run. One such who had instigated the takeover had been known for expropriating Jewish property in Paris.
The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story.
Helena Rubinstein.com; Wikipedia; Helena Rubinstein – Brand, Makeup & Life – Biography
‘Ugly Beauty’ by Ruth Brandon; Helena Rubinstein – the Woman Who Invented Beauty by Michele Fitoussi
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What an extraordinary story and an extraordinary woman. To come to Australia when she did, as a young woman with very little, is such an act of courage, hope and aspiration.