Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein; December 25, 1872 – April 1, 1965) was a Polish businesswoman, art collector, and philanthropist. She founded Helena Rubinstein Incorporated cosmetics company, which ultimately made her one of the world's wealthiest women.
Rubinstein was the eldest of eight daughters born to Polish Jews, Gitel Scheindel "Augusta" Rubinstein née Silberfeld and Naftali Herz "Horace" Rubinstein, a shopkeeper in Kraków, Lesser Poland. Helena was born into the Kazimierz district of Kraków, then part of Austria-Hungary following the partitions of Poland. She was the cousin of the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber and of Ruth Rappaport's mother.
Rubinstein emigrated with no financial security and little command of the English language from Poland to Australia in 1896 after declining an arranged marriage. She found accommodation with her uncle in Coleraine, in the Western Victoria region, an area with sheep-farming industry that produced lanolin, one of the ingredients of the face creams she had brought with her from Poland. She developed the idea to use lavender, pine bark, and water lilies to mask the lanolin's pungent odor in the creams she began to produce herself. Rubinstein experimented with her stylish clothes and milky complexion, which did not pass unnoticed among the town's ladies; however, 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.
After a disagreement with her uncle and a period employed as a governess, Helena began working as a waitress at the Winter Garden tearooms in Melbourne. There, she secured funding from an admirer to invest in the production and launch of a face cream called Crème Valaze. She subsequently opened a Salon in Collins Street in Melbourne.
Her business expanded to Sydney within five years, generating enough revenue to fund a salon called "Salon de Beauté Valaze" in London. In 1908, her sister Ceska took over the Management of the Melbourne Salon, allowing Helena to relocate to London to expand internationally. She financed the move herself, since women were not yet allowed to obtain business loans from banks .
Marriage and children – London and Paris
In 1908, Helena married the Polish-born American journalist Edward William Titus in London. They had two sons, Roy Valentine Titus (London, December 12, 1909 – New York, June 18, 1989) and Horace Titus (London, April 23, 1912 – New York, May 18, 1958). The family eventually moved to Paris where she opened a salon in 1912. Her husband helped with the salon's publicity material and set up a small publishing house, subsequently publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover and hiring Samuel Putnam to translate famous model Alice Prin's (Kiki de Montparnasse) memoirs, Kiki's Memoirs.
Rubinstein and Titus relocated to New York City at the outbreak of World War I, where she opened a cosmetics salon in 1915, the forerunner of a chain throughout the country. During that period, she competed openly with another successful female cosmetics entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden. The two businesses pursued similar business strategies, seeking celebrity endorsement, perceived value of overpricing and marketing claims anchored 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 directly. In 1928, she sold the American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million, ($127 million in 2022). Following the onset of the Great Depression, she repurchased the company's stock, by then greatly reduced in value, for under $1 million and later grew the company's value to $100 million, with salons and outlets operating in nearly a dozen US cities.
This period of Rubinstein's early business career, has been the 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 Miró. She commissioned Spanish artist Salvador Dalí to design a powder compact as well a portrait of herself in 1943, titled Princess Arthchild Gourielle-Helena Rubinstein. American artist Andy Warhol drew a stylized portrait of Rubinstein in Kyoto, Japan in 1956. Other artists who painted her portrait were Graham Sutherland in 1957 for the Helena Rubinstein Foundation, now in the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Marie Laurencin in 1934 (now in the National Portrait Gallery (United States), Raoul Dufy (1930), Roberto Montenegro (1941). After Rubinstein's last visit to Australia, William Dobell painted a series of eight portraits in 1957.
The 1941 Montenegro portrait showed Rubinstein wearing a monumental silver pectoral made specifically for her by the Taxco designer William Spratling. The necklace, adapted from a colonial halo in Rubinstein's collection, became known as the Helena Rubinstein Necklace. Rubinstein collected numerous Spratling pieces and visited him at his home in Acapulco. Spratling's 1944 catalogue listed the design as “Collar Rubenstein,” no. S137.
Following her divorce from Titus in 1938, Helena married Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia (sometimes spelled Courielli-Tchkonia; born in Georgia, February 18, 1895, died in New York City, November 21, 1955) who was therefore 23 years younger than his new wife. His claim to the Gourielli title from Georgian nobility derived from his grandmother's side of the family.
Rubinstein later named a male cosmetics line after her second husband.
Rubinstein founded the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and in 1957 she established the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship in Australia. In 1953, she established the philanthropic Helena Rubinstein Foundation to provide funds to organizations specializing in health, medical research and rehabilitation.
In 1959, Rubinstein represented the US cosmetics industry at the American National Exhibition in Moscow.
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 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 versions of modernism is explored by Marie J. Clifford. A feature-length documentary film, The Powder & the Glory (2009) by Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman, details the rivalry between Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden.