Helena Rubinstein built a successful cosmetics business in a time when few women worked or wore makeup. She moved from Australia to London, Paris, and New York, becoming a famous philanthropist. She had a stormy marriage and died at age 94.
Helena Rubinstein built a business empire selling cosmetics at a time when there were few employment opportunities for women and most women didn’t wear makeup. She was born in 1870 in Kraków, Poland, which was then part of Austria-Hungary, and was the eldest of eight children. Her father was a shopkeeper.
At 18, Helena Rubinstein moved to Australia and while there, Helena began treating women’s dry skin conditions with a face cream formula developed by Jacob Lykusky, a Hungarian chemist. She soon opened a shop in Melbourne and by 1908 she had made enough money to leave one of her sisters in charge of the shop so she could move to London to expand her business. This was accomplished at a time when women rarely, if ever, received bank loans.
Once in London, Rubinstein met and married her first husband, Edward William Titus, an American journalist, and had two children. By 1912, the family had moved to Paris, France. Helena Rubinstein’s businesses were thriving and her Paris establishment became a salon. Socialites and celebrities have been invited to her home for extravagant dinner parties. Her contact with the rich, famous and infamous has raised her social status and the popularity of her beauty products has followed suit. While in Paris, Titus ran a small publishing house, which published the infamous Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
With the outbreak of World War I, the family moved to New York for security and business opportunities. American women represented a new frontier for her growing cosmetic line. Her beauty program started with twelve skin treatments. As women got used to buying her skincare products at her spa, it became easier to persuade them to try her powders and lipsticks as well. She and Elizabeth Arden became bitter business rivals; both women were very knowledgeable about what it took to sell beauty products.
In 1937, Helena Rubinstein and Edward Titus ended what had become a stormy marriage. Tito had often been guilty of infidelity. A year later Rubinstein married Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, who may or may not have been a prince of Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union. Gourielli-Tchkonia was more than twenty years younger than Rubinstein.
Helena Rubinstein was a study in contrasts. She had lavish tastes in art, furniture, fashion, and jewelry; yet she wore cheap nightgowns and packed lunch in a brown bag. She could be very generous and became a famous philanthropist, but she didn’t help Marc Chagall get her daughter and son-in-law out of Nazi Germany. Perhaps that memory of hers contributed to her decision to found the Helena Rubinstein Pavilion of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and other philanthropic causes in Israel. She died of natural causes at the age of 94 and is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Queens, New York.
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