Elizabeth Arden was the owner of a cosmetics and beauty corporation, using modern mass market techniques to bring her cosmetic products to public attention, she owned a chain of beauty salons and spars.
Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham, on 31st December, 1884, to a Scottish grocer in Ontario.
Named after a famous British Nursing Pioneer, like many other girls of her time. She was the youngest of five children. She moved to New York and went to work first as a helper in a cosmetic shop and then in a beauty salon as a partner.
In 1909, when the partnership broke up, she opened her own beauty salon on Fifth Avenue, and changed her name to Elizabeth Arden. She then began to formulate, manufacture, and sell her own cosmetic products, and in 1922, she opened her first salon in France.
She married Thomas Lewis, an American, in 1918, and through him gained American citizenship. Thomas Lewis acted as her business manager until their divorce in 1935, when he went to work for a rival firm owned by Helena Rubinstein. About the same time Elizabeth Arden converted her summer home in Maine, into the Maine Chance Beauty Spa, and then expanded the line of spas both nationally and internationally.
By the end of the 1940s, Elizabeth Arden had more that 100 salons, spread through the United States, Europe, Australia and South America, and more than 300 cosmetic products.
These cosmetics always sold for a premium price as she maintained an image of exclusivity and quality. Through her marketing campaigns, Elizabeth Arden taught women how to apply makeup, and co-ordinate the colours of eyes, lips and facial makeup.
She also pioneered the concepts of scientific formulation of cosmetics, and beauty makeovers. She was largely responsible for establishing makeup as proper, appropriate, even necessary, for a ladylike image.
