Cosmetics queen Elizabeth Arden made the cover of Time in 1946 and named her Blue Grass scent after her beloved Kentucky horse country. Elizabeth Arden celebrates its 100th anniversary and a singular story.
She lived the American dream, an immigrant who changed her name and made her fortune when she moved to New York and founded what soon grew to become a global empire.
When Elizabeth Arden made the cover of Time magazine in 1946 she was nearly 70 but looked 20 years younger, and to show how far she'd come she was there not as a pioneer of the cosmetics industry but as a leading horse owner and breeder. The following year her horse Jet Pilot won the Kentucky Derby.
When she introduced Blue Grass fragrance in 1935 she was told women wouldn't buy something named after the rolling meadows of the horse country she loved. The perfume went on to become a best-seller, underlining the importance of her entrepreneurial instinct.
Arden had instinct in spades, and a single-minded ambition. She married and divorced twice and had no children and at her height her company turned over $60 million a year. After her death it went through a number of hands, but is now a pioneer again, clocking up new successes in the celebrity fragrance market (Britney, Mariah, Elizabeth Taylor, Usher et al) and in bringing cosmeceuticals to the mainstream with the landmark launch of Prevage in 2005.
Elizabeth Arden cosmetics and skincare is now a $1 billion plus company with its products sold in more than 100 countries. Its history in New Zealand dates back to 1926. It is also one of the oldest large-scale cosmetics companies about. L'Oreal turned 100 last year, but began with hair products and the name of Elizabeth Arden's great rival, Helena Rubinstein, is no longer emblazoned across items used by millions every day.
A documentary film about the two women called The Powder and the Glory was made last year.
Their stories had many parallels. Polish-born Rubinstein was eight years older than Arden and also an immigrant. She headed first to Australia in her 20s, where she began selling face creams containing lanolin. She soon set up shop catering for society women in Collins St, Melbourne, before self-financing herself to London to do the same in 1908.
That was the same year that Florence Nightingale Graham moved from a life of odd jobs in Canada to join her brother in New York. By 1910 Florence was no longer sharing a name with the Crimean War's angel of mercy, she was Elizabeth Arden, owner of a beauty salon on swanky 5th Avenue.
It had taken the 30-year-old just two years to gain work bookkeeping for a cosmetics firm where she quickly soaked up the practical side of the business and persuaded a beauty therapist called Elizabeth Hubbard to become her partner, but they fell out. Armed with a new surname from the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden, she reinvented herself.
She painted the door of her shop bright red to get the attention of the wealthy women who frequented the neighbourhood. Inside she performed beauty treatments, swept floors and kept books. Within six months she'd repaid her brother the $6000 he loaned her to set up shop.
Early successes were a light face cream developed with a chemist called Venetian Cream Amoretta which was very different from the greasy formulations of the day. One of her most innovative moves and smartest marketing strategies was using her own name on her products. The enduring Eight Hour Cream was launched in 1930, the year she proclaimed: "There are only three American names known in every corner of the globe: Singer Sewing Machines, Coca-Cola and Elizabeth Arden".
In 1929 she was offered $15 million for her company, but she refused and during the Depression she continued to flourish, leading Fortune magazine to declare in 1938 that she "had probably earned more money than any other businesswoman in history".
One of Arden's breakthroughs came early on, when she was impressed on a visit to Paris in 1914 by the widespread use of cosmetics, leading her to sell the formerly risque rouge and lipstick to her burgeoning American clientele and introduce eye makeup to the nation. She supported the suffragettes who wore red lipstick as a symbol of defiance and independence by giving them her lipstick. In World War II she captured the victory spirit by advertising red lipstick as an essential accoutrement of the emancipated service woman.
Shortly after Arden first visited Paris, Rubinstein left it to come to New York. She'd moved across the Channel to expand her business with the American husband she had acquired in London. They'd become part of the literary set as he was the publisher of the scandalous novel Lady Chatterley's Lover. At the outbreak of World War I the couple moved to the States and opened a new battlefront.
Both combatants were petite women with excellent complexions and both were pedalling their wares with a very 20th century approach to marketing and service. Arden clocked up the most firsts: the first colour cosmetics collection in 1916, the first travel sizes a year later and employing travelling demonstrators from 1918.
She ran the first cosmetic advertisements in cinemas and gave advice on the radio.
Her luxurious beauty salons offered extensive services, including hair styling and clothes retailing.
Arden's motto was: "To be beautiful and natural is the birthright of every woman." One of Rubinstein's maxims was: "There are no ugly women, only lazy ones."
Neither woman could be accused of laziness, but both were considered social climbers, perhaps because they were outsiders. Rubinstein was an art patron whose second marriage was to a Georgian man 23 years younger, who claimed to be a prince, giving her the title Helena, Princess Gourielli.
Arden was known for her charity work with uptown friends and for a time employed Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. She, too, had a second marriage, also short-lived to a Russian, Prince Michael Evlanoff. She consoled herself with her horses and dogs and gracious country homes, one of which became the Maine Chance Spa, where wealthy women paid up to $500 a week for pampering and instruction.
At its height there were over 30 spas in America and they took a holistic approach with exercise and diet classes being part of the treatment regime. Arden was an early advocate of yoga and did daily handstands for the benefit of her complexion. Her approach of Total Beauty, encompassing external and internal disciplines was ahead of its time and she believed in co-opting science to help out nature.
In her later years she lived with her niece and never stopped working. She died in 1966, a year after her rival Rubinstein, but the company of which she was sole owner had to be sold off to pay huge inheritance taxes as she'd made no proper provisions to cover bequests to family and employees.
Perhaps it simply never occurred to her that one day she might not be around. Indeed Elizabeth Arden, the name she created, still lives proudly on.
