Authors: Ruth Brandon
Helena decided to start her business in Melbourne.
It was a large city (in 1901 it already had over 500,000 inhabitants), and her
uncle John was established there. And—in her second stroke of luck—it proved to
be an uniquely propitious location for what she now proposed. Whether or not
Australian men disapproved of makeup was of little interest to Australian
women—for unlike Europeans, they did not depend on men for their money. In
Europe in 1901, respectable women only worked if they had no other means of
support. Possible jobs were still effectively limited to dressmaking, millinery,
and teaching, either as governesses or in schools. Australia, too, had its
dressmakers, milliners, and governesses. But Australian women also worked in
other fields, as journalists, telephone switchboard operators, and secretaries,
in shops and hotels, in small factories . . . Around 35 percent of
Melbourne’s breadwinners were women, and 40 percent of working-age women were in
paid employment. The Melbourne
Age
coined the phrase
“bachelor girls” to describe the young women who, like Helena herself, arrived
in the city looking for work—and who constituted an instant customer base. Their
wages might be small—the average female wage was only half what men could expect
to earn—but this was, nonetheless, their own money, to spend as they
pleased.
10
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 urgently 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.
H
er
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.