Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein - December 25, 1872, to April 1, 1965) was a Polish-American businesswoman, art collector, and philanthropist. A cosmetics entrepreneur, she was the founder and eponym of Helena Rubinstein Incorporated cosmetics company, which made her one of the world's richest women.

Early Life
Rubinstein was the eldest of eight daughters born to Polish Jews, Augusta - Gitte (Gitle) Shaindel Rubinstein nee Silberfield, and Horace - Naftoli Hertz Rubinstein. Her father was a shopkeeper in Krakow, Lesser Poland, which was then occupied by Austria - Hungry following the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. The existentialist philosopher Martain Buber was her cousin. She was also the cousin of Ruth Rappaport's mother.

Move to Australia
After refusing an arranged marriage, Rubinstein emigrated from Poland to Australia in 1896, with no money and little English. Her stylish clothes and milky complexion did not pass unnoticed among the town's ladies, however, and 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.

Coleraine, in the Western Victoria region, where her uncle was a shopkeeper, might have been an "awful place" but was home to some 75 million sheep that secreted abundant quantities of lanolin. These sheep were the wealth of the nation and the Western District's vast mobs of merinos produced the finest wool in the land. To disguise the lanolin's pungent odor, Rubinstein experimented with lavender, pine bark, and water lilies.

Rubinstein had a falling out with her uncle, but after a stint as a bush, the governess began waitressing at the Winter Garden tearooms Melbourne. There, she found an admirer willing to stump up the funds to launch her Creme Valaze, supposedly including herbs imported from the Carpathian Mountains. It cost ten pence and was sold for six shillings. Known to her customers only as Helena, Rubinstein could coon afford to open a salon in fashionable Collins Street, selling glamour as a science to customers whose skin was "diagnosed" and a suitable treatment "prescribed".

Sydney was next and within five years, Australian operations were profitable enough to finance a Salon de Beaute Valaze in London. As such, Rubinstein formed one of the world's first cosmetic companies. Her business enterprise proved immensely successful and later in life, she used her enormous wealth to support charitable institutions in the fields of education, art, and health.

Rubinstein rapidly expanded her operation. In 1908, her sister Ceska assumed the Melbourne shop's operation, and with $100,000, Rubinstein 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 her own).

Marriage and children - London and Paris
In 1908, she married the Polish-born American journalist Edward William Titus in London. They had two sons, Roy Valentine Titus and Horace Titus. They eventually moved to Paris where she opened a Salon in 1912.

Her husband helped with writing the publicity and set up a small publishing house, published Lady Chatterley's Lover, and hired Samuel Putnam to translate famous model Kiki's memoirs.

Move to the United States
At the outbreak of World War I, she and Titus moved to New York City, where she opened a cosmetic salon in 1915, the forerunner of a chain throughout the country. Helena opened up the boundless American market, and she skillfully used it, despite serious competitors. This was the beginning of her vicious rivalry with another notable woman in the cosmetics industry, Elizabeth Arden.

Both Rubinstein and Arden, who died within 18 months of each other, were social climbers. They were both keenly aware of effective marketing and luxurious packaging, the attraction of beauticians in neat uniforms, the value of celebrity endorsements, the perceived value of overpricing, and the promotion of the 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. The "Day of Beauty" in the various salons became a great success. The purported portrait of Rubinstein in her advertising was of a middle-aged mannequin with a Gentile appearance.

In 1928, she sold the American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million. After the onset of the Great Depression, she bought back the nearly worthless stock for less than $1 million and eventually increased the value of the company to $100 million, establishing salons and outlets in almost a dozen US cities. This saga, and Rubinstein's early business career, has been a 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 Miro. She commissioned artist Salvador Dali to design a powder compact as well a portrait of herself.

Divorce and Remarriage
Freed of her former marriage vows, in 1938, Helena Rubinstein readily married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia (sometimes called as Courielli-Tchkonia; born in Georgia, February 18, 1895, died in New York City November 21, 1955), whose somewhat clouded matrilinear claim to Georgian nobility stemmed from his having been born a member of the untitled noble Tchkonia family of Guria, enticing the ambitious young man to appropriate the genuine title of his grandmother, born Princess Gourielli.

Gourielli-Tchkonia was 23 years younger than Rubinstein. Egar for a regal title, Rubinstein pursued the handsome youth avidly, coming to name a male cosmetics line after her youthful prized catch. Some have claimed that the marriage was a marketing ploy, including Rubinstein's being able to pass herself off as Helena Princess Gourielli.

Rubinstein took a packed lunch to work and was frugal in many matters, but bought top-fashion clothing and valuable fine art and furniture. She founded the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and 1957 she established Helena Rubinstein traveling art scholarship Australia. In 1953, she established the philanthropic Helena Rubinstein Foundation to provide funds to organizations specializing in health, medical research, and rehabilitation as well as to the America-Isreal Cultural Foundation and scholarships to Israelis.

In 1959, Rubinstein represented the US Cosmetics industry at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.

Called "Madame" by her employees, she eschewed idle character, continued to be active in the corporation throughout her life, even from her sick bed, and staffed the company with her relatives.

Death and Legacy
Rubinstein died April 1, 1965, of natural causes and was buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens. Some of her estate, including African and fine art, Lucite furniture, and overwrought 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 modernism is explored by Marie J. Clifford. A feature-length documentary film, The Powder and the Glory (2009) by Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman, details the rivalry between Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden.

What's with the company these days?
In 1973, the company Helena Rubinstein, Inc. was sold to Colgate-Palmolive and is now owned by L'Oreal. The L'Oreal takeover was to cause a good deal of scandal as a company founder, Eugene Schuller, had been an enthusiastic collaborator during the war, and in its aftermath, L'Oreal became notorious for employing ex-Nazis on the run. Jacques Correze, who engineered the takeover, was one of these: he had been active in expropriating Jewish property in Paris.

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

A £300 annual Rubinstein Portrait Prize was awarded for works by Australian artists. Prizewinners were Romola Clifton in 1960; William Boissevain 1961; Margaret Olley 1962; Vladas Meskenas 1963; Judy Cassab 1964 and 1965; Jack Carrington Smith 1966.

References;
1. Helena Rubinstein