Helena Rubinstein was the world’s first female self-made millionaire. She commissioned portraits from artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol, and she hobnobbed with the likes of Coco Chanel, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Josephine Baker, Audrey Hepburn, Colette, and James Joyce. She was a legendarily generous philanthropist and collector who trumpeted East Asian, South American, and African art decades before her peers, and who took a bag lunch to work every day. She was a four-foot-ten, painfully shy Polish girl from a poor Jewish family who, at age thirty, fled to Australia to avoid an arranged marriage – and went on to marry a bona-fide prince twenty-three years her junior after she’d made her fortune as the first cosmetics magnate. Add in the fact that she popularized bright-red lipstick (a hallowed achievement unto itself), and there are no two ways about it: Helena Rubinstein was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.
Yet, since her death fifty years ago this week (she lived to age ninety-two), Rubinstein’s legacy has faded. Her once-powerful beauty company has changed hands twice and is now an ugly stepchild of L’Oreal. Her salons, once considered glamour incarnate, have closed their doors. Ask a person under forty who she was, and chances are good that they’ll draw a blank. Continue Reading →
