Helena Rubinstein was born on 25th December, 1870. A Polish cosmetics industrialist, and founder of the Helena Rubinstein Emporium, making her one of the world's richest women.
She was born Chaja Rubinstein in Krakow, where her father was a shopkeeper. The eldest of eight children, she studied medicine in Switzerland for a short time, before moving to Australia in 1902, with no money and little English.
Her stylish clothes and milky complexion did not pass unnoticed among the town's ladies, where she soon found enthusiastic buyers for the jars of beauty cream in her luggage. Spotting a market, she bagan to make her own.
Her uncle was a shopkeeper in Coleraine, Western Victoria, an area noted for its 75 million sheep. The Merino sheep wool produces abundant quantities of lanolin, a comoditty used in the production of cosmetics. Rubinstein experimented with lavender, pine bark and water lilies, to disguise the essential products's strong odour.
After an argument with her uncle she got a job as a bush governess, and then as a waitress at the Winter Garden Tearooms, in Melbourne. There she found an admirer willing to fund the launch of her Creme Valaze, with herbs imported from the 'Carpathian Mountains'. This cream sold as fast as she could make it.
She changed her name to Helena Rubinstein and opened up a salon in the fashionable Collins Street, shortly followed by a Salon in Sydney. Within 5 years Australian operations were profitable enough to finance a Salon 'de Beaute Valaze' in London. This formed one of the world's first cosmetic companies.
With her sister Ceska taking over the Melbourne shop's operation, she moved to London and began what was to become an international enterprise.
This business enterprise proved immensely successful and later in life she used her enormous
In 1912 she moved to Paris to open a salon there, but at the outbreak of World War 1 she moved to the United States, where she opened a cosmetics salon in New York City in 1915, whch became the forerunner of a chain which spread throughout the country. From 1917 Helena Rubinstein took on the manufacturing and wholesale distribution of her products, and the resulting 'Day of Beauty' in various salons became a great success.
In 1928 she sold the American business, but after the Great Depression she bought it back as nearly worthless stock, and eventually turned it back around, establishing salons and outlets in almost a dozen U.S. cities and making the shares worth multimillions of dollars.
Her subsequent Spa at 715 Fifth Avenue included a restaurant,and a gymnasium, and in 1959 she represented the U.S cosmetics industry at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.
She was the first self-made female millionaire, and renowned for her saying 'there are no ugly women'. And introduced of the concept of 'problem' skin tyes, and used her wealth to support charitable institutions in the fields of education, art and health.
