Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Unsurprisingly, the beauty-cream business was not a wholly unplowed field. Before the rise of commercial products, most women made their own simple cosmetics. And the fact that this was a familiar domestic craft, with cheap raw materials, made it a tempting, and unintimidating, female business proposition.2 Recipes were available in printed compilations in the same way as food recipes, and often using the same ingredients. Skin creams, for example, were made from an emulsion of fat and water, perfumed with scented plant extracts. Women used whatever fat was to hand: milk or cream, goose grease, calf’s foot jelly, almond oil, egg yolks. (The egg whites, mixed with lemon juice, could be used to make an astringent face mask.) As it happened, Australia abounded in a particularly suitable fat: this was sheep country, and lanolin, a by-product of sheep’s wool, is both cheap and good for the skin. And lots of ladies advertised in the Melbourne papers, offering various treatments for the skin and hair.

  The existing Melbourne enterprises, however, were mostly semi-amateur and hand-to-mouth—not at all the kind of business Helena had in mind. But proper business start-ups need capital, and in Australia, as throughout the British Empire, no woman could take out a bank loan under her own name. To start a serious business meant finding someone to underwrite her.

  In her unreliable memoir, written sixty years later, Helena identified her Maecenas as a Miss Helen Macdonald, a friend she had made on board ship when she came to Australia, “far from wealthy, but she insisted upon lending me part of her life savings, the two hundred and fifty pounds I would need to start my venture.”11 In fact no such person appears on the relevant passenger list. In another account, she suggested that a Coleraine friend come with her to Melbourne and take a half share in the business. The offer was declined—surely one of the worst business decisions in history—but perhaps it was this friend who contributed the money.12 Whatever its provenance, the £250 was forthcoming. It was the only money Helena Rubinstein ever borrowed. Now all that remained was to create a product and sell it.

  The first thing was to learn, if she did not already know it, the simple knack of making face cream by emulsifying lanolin and adding essential plant oils to disguise its unpleasant sheepy smell. Some years later she would instruct her London manageress in this process, with a recipe for making blackhead cream:

  Take one pint of oil, put it into a white basin and take four pints of peroxyde 6 percent and add to the oil or rather the foundation. But you must do it very slowly. You will spoil it if you put in much at a time. You just add a little by little to the oil and stir the whole time. Stir with a knife. The less peroxyde you put in at a time the better and thicker it will get. Add a little rose geranium, to perfume. Also mix.

  Essential oils were expensive—violet perfume cost £25,000 a kilo, “more expensive than diamonds and pearls,” but a little went a long way.13

  Anyone who has made mayonnaise will recognize the method—and indeed, Helena Rubinstein always referred to her workbench as her “kitchen.” She adored preparing creams and lotions, and her “kitchen” remained the place she was always happiest. Many years later, when she met her fellow Pole Marie Curie, who had isolated radium by boiling down ton upon ton of pitchblende in a drafty old shed, she startled the distinctly un-domestic Madame Curie by asking what her “cuisine” was like.

  With some of the £250 she rented a large, bright room in Melbourne’s city center, painted it white, adorned it with curtains made from the unused evening gowns she had brought from Europe, made up some stock, painted a sign announcing “Helena Rubinstein—Beauty Salon,” and opened for business. She started out with just one all-purpose face cream, “Crème Valaze.”

  “VALAZE” BY DR LYKUSKI, the most celebrated European Skin Specialist, is the best nourisher of the skin. “VALAZE” will improve the worst of skin in one month. 3/6d. and 5/6d. If posted, 6d. extra.3 Available from Helena Rubinstein and company.14

  Valaze, “of exceptional value to those who are disfigured with freckles, sun-burn, wrinkles, eczema, blackheads or skin-blemishes of any kind,” would remain a central Rubinstein product for the next fifty years.

  Although her advertisements emphasized the cream’s exotic provenance, specially imported from Poland and “compounded from rare herbs which only grow in the Carpathian Mountains,” this description was pure snake oil. Importing someone else’s skin cream from Europe to Australia would not just be grindingly slow, it would eat disastrously into the markup. Lots of factors made Helena Rubinstein rich—intelligence, astuteness, hard work, lucky timing. But what made her (and her competitors) so very rich, so fast, was the markup: the difference between cheap raw ingredients and the astounding prices charged for the finished product. A few months before her death, Madame found the original Valaze formula among a heap of old papers in the cellar of her Paris home: it contained only such common raw materials as ceresine wax, mineral oil, and sesame.15 Psychologically, however, “rare Carpathian herbs” were essential. Then, as now, the beauty industry’s real product was magic; and when it came to transforming perfumed fats into magic vials, boring old rose oil or pine-bark extract could never compete with rare Carpathian herbs.

  This was Australia’s first proper beauty salon, and it aroused enormous curiosity. “People streamed in,” Rubinstein remembered. “The majority stayed for advice, and few left without a jar of my hand-labelled cream.”16 This was no small purchase. A milliner earned around £2 a week, a barmaid £1, a dressmaker £3: a pot of Valaze therefore consumed a good proportion of a week’s wages. However, one of Helena Rubinstein’s early discoveries was that in the beauty business, high prices do not deter sales. On the contrary—if one of her lines failed to sell, Madame would raise the price, and sales would miraculously increase.4

  Even as she struggled to keep up with the demand of the walk-in trade, Rubinstein was inundated with mail orders—many of them spurred by an article about the salon in a Sydney newspaper. Newspaper articles were not only free, they were more effective than any number of expensive advertisements. From then on, Rubinstein made it her business to court the press. She studied beauty editors’ personal preferences, and in later years, when she was due to meet one, always made sure to wear some dispensable item of jewelery—a ring, a bracelet—that she could press upon them as a parting gift. Now she wrote to each customer offering to return their money if they weren’t prepared to wait. She had placed a new order with Dr. Lykusky, but it would not arrive for a while. Only one customer asked for her money back. After days and nights of feverish work in the “kitchen,” preparing the cream and packing the jars, Miss Rubinstein announced that her stock was replenished, and filled the orders.

  She worked eighteen-hour days, and (as she told it sixty years later) “lost many a beau, and missed the fun of being young.” The truth was that being young had not been fun—and that work was. “Work has been my best beauty treatment!” she wrote at the end of her life. “It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young. It certainly keeps a woman alive!”17 It interested her more than any man ever did. She could never keep a boyfriend for long, Helena recounted of those Melbourne days. Hoping for a night out, they found themselves hefting vats of cream, filling jars, or sticking labels. Even when she met Edward Titus and fell in love—even after they had children—work came first.

  The business grew with extraordinary speed. After two years, the original £250 debit had become a credit of £12,000, and larger premises were urg
ently needed. Helena took a seven-room suite in a new building a little way down the street and began to train up a small staff. Her advertising philosophy was simple: “Fear copy with a bit of blah-blah.” Until now women had just had skin, but now they had different varieties of skin: oily, dry, or normal. This distinction sowed profitable uncertainty among her clientele, who demanded, and happily bought, different creams—moisturizing, astringent, bleaching—to combat their newly defined deficiencies. It was a brilliant move. Later, in a similar brainstorm, Helena rebranded and promoted her existing range of creams and lotions as suitable for particular hours of the day or night, making them “Wake-Up Creams,” or “Night Creams.” An investigation of cosmetics, conducted by the left-wing pressure group Consumer Research in the 1930s, quoted a trade journal that observed: “From a merchandising point of view every manufacturer should . . . avoid ‘all purpose’ claims, because, even though they could be in part substantiated, it is better to sell a woman four different creams for four different purposes than one cream for all purposes.”18

  A lesser woman might have been satisfied with this unheard-of success. But Helena Rubinstein’s secret weapon, the one that set her furthest apart from the small-time habitués of the small ads, was her utter imperviousness to satisfaction. She always needed to move on. And at this point, that would require actual knowledge—dermatological, dietary, even surgical—not available in Australia. In the summer of 1905, confident that the business was established enough to survive her brief absence, she embarked for Europe, and a crash course in the science of beauty.

  Her first stop was Krakow. For ten years she had bathed its memory in the rosy glow of homesickness. The reality, inevitably, was anticlimactic, but also liberating. “The old town had not moved a pace in my absence. To me who had changed so much in a short while, it seemed indeed to have moved backwards, and to be a bit alien. . . . Home was not the same to me and from that time on I felt my life was in my own hands.”19 Cutting short her visit (she would not see her parents again), she set out on a whirlwind tour of Europe’s skin-care specialists, working, as was her habit, day and night, so as not to waste a second of her limited time in Europe. In Paris, where she stayed with her sister Pauline Hirschberg (who would eventually take charge of the Helena Rubinstein Paris salon), she studied dermatology, learning “[the skin’s] intricate anatomy and the principles which govern its appearance and health.” In Wiesbaden she became acquainted with the then highly experimental science of facial surgery, and learned about metabolism and diet and their relation to health and beauty. In Vienna she met a woman doctor, Frau Doktor Emmy List, who became a good friend and would later come to work for her in London.

  Here, at last, was the education she had dreamed of as a girl, albeit in a telescoped version. Described in My Life for Beauty as “I think the most stimulating years of my life,”20 this period in fact lasted two or three months at most. She left Australia in June and returned in September. But for Madame, time was relative. In her later publicity she knocked a decade off her age, simply losing the years in which nothing had happened, and in the same way she extended these life-changing months into the years they psychologically represented. When she told an American interviewer, in 1922, that she “studied medicine in Germany,” that (for a week or two) was what she did. The trip to Krakow had disposed, finally and forever, of the Kazimierz daughter; Wiesbaden, Vienna, Paris, Berlin, legitimized the businesswoman. She was no longer in any doubt “that my choice had been right—that this work I had chosen was infinitely preferable to any marriage which my aunt might have destined for me.”21

  When the time came to return to Australia, she did not travel alone, but took with her Ceska, the third-youngest of her sisters, and a cousin, Lola. All but one of the eight Rubinstein sisters would end up working for Helena’s company, as would an assortment of cousins. This can be seen as an act of generosity—having discovered the pleasures of the self-sufficient working life, she wanted to extend them to her family. When fashion editor Ernestine Carter, having met the London and Paris Rubinstein sisters, congratulated Madame on her clever family, “she focussed her black gaze on me. ‘Better they work,’ she said.”22 But family also staved off loneliness. Later, when she became rich, she constantly entertained the famous personalities she encountered in her working life and through her interest in art and fashion. But that was business rather than pleasure, part of the public persona around which the entire Helena Rubinstein operation revolved. For relaxation she relied on her sisters, and endless games of cards.

  She opened more salons, and devised a range of wonderful new products: Novena Poudre, a face powder for dry and normal skin; Valaze Herbal Powder for oily skins; Dr. Lykusky’s Valaze Blackhead and Open-Pore Paste; Valaze Red Nose Ointment and Powder; Valaze Liquidine . . . “Money flowed in, in a continuous stream,” she recalled in her first memoir, The Art of Feminine Beauty. “It seemed the whole Australian continent—or, at least, its feminine half—was bent on beautification.”23

  But her visit to Europe had expanded her ambitions. If Krakow had been a backwater, neither was Australia the center of the universe. Europe called, and only one thing held her back: a new acquaintance, Edward Titus.

  Titus was a Polish Jew who had known Helena’s sisters in Krakow. He had emigrated to America, become a journalist there, and acquired American nationality; now he was traveling around Australia. Arriving in Melbourne, he called in at the salon. For the first and last time in her life, Helena fell in love. “Until then,” she said, “most of the people I had known had led rather narrow, humdrum lives; they were afraid of change and suspicious of new ideas. Edward Titus excited my imagination; he was an intellectual, interested in everything, and he had many friends in the literary and artistic world.” He took her to theaters and concerts; soon they were seeing a great deal of each other; and one day—to her surprise, she said—he proposed.

  “Marriage had never entered into my scheme of things,” she wrote at the end of her life.24 She loved Titus, but she loved her business more; if she married now, would she ever fulfil her ambitions? So she followed her invariable habit when faced with a difficult decision, and fled the country. She packed her bags, withdrew £100,000 from the bank (the equivalent of about $11.7 million today5), and, leaving the Australian business in the safe hands of her sister and cousin, took ship for London.

  Until now, moneyed women had been heiresses, rich widows, queens, sometimes even empresses. Helena Rubinstein had become the world’s first self-made female tycoon.

  II

  We cannot all be ladies de Milo, but we can all be the best possible in our individual cases.

  Little blots of blemish

  In a visage glad

  Make the lover thoughtful

  And the husband mad.

  —EARLY RUBINSTEIN ADVERTISEMENT

  Helena had decided to go to London because it was “the world center of thought, taste, money and beauty.”25 But she knew nobody there, and her first few weeks were lonely. She shared a small flat in Arlington Street with an Australian girl she met on the boat, and spent her days trudging round the West End in search of suitable premises. Eventually she heard that a Georgian house in Grafton Street belonging to Lord Salisbury was for rent. It cost more than she wanted to pay but she took it nonetheless. It was in the right position, and the attic could be converted into a flat for her to live above the shop. Then she returned to Australia, where Ti
tus awaited her, and got married. They at once reembarked for Europe, and a honeymoon on the French Riviera. Madame’s pattern for the coming decades was set: constant journeys, and an uneasy juggling of her personal and business lives.

  Helena Rubinstein’s marriage to Edward Titus might have been designed to provide ammunition for those who—like L’Oréal’s founder, Eugène Schueller—felt nothing but bad could come of women entering the world of work. Of course it was no new thing for wives to be richer than their husbands. But until now those wives, and their bank balances, had bolstered, rather than challenged, their fortunate husbands’ position in society. High-earning wives were something else—a novelty, and not necessarily an agreeable one psychologically.

  What was the role of such a person’s husband? Whether consort or housekeeper, it was quite evidently subordinate—even now not easy for many, and particularly hard in a culture where men had always been in charge. When Titus proposed, he talked about the business he and Helena would build together.26 But the business was entirely hers, and always would be. “He claims partnership in everything but everybody knows he has no claim to anything,” she complained in 1915.27