The woman who invented beauty

"I fell in love with beauty a long, long time ago, but what I wanted was to create beauty - not to be blinded by it."

"I've always thought that a woman owes it to herself to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity."

"American women had purple noses and grey lips and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder. I recognized that the United States could be my life's work."

"Work has been indeed my best beauty treatment. I believe in hard work. It keeps the wrinkles out of the mind and the spirit. It helps to keep a woman young."

"I have never had my face lifted. I prefer to have my spirits lifted. In my opinion, the effect is very nearly the same."

"Beauty is power. The greatest power of them all."

Facts:

• Born into a poor Jewish family in Krakow, Poland, she fled the arranged marriage her family had planned for her by emigrating - changing her name to Helena Rubinstein on her identification papers and wiping 10 years off her age in the process - and began her cosmetics empire in rural Australia.
• She expanded her horizons when she opened beauty salons in Mayfair, London (in 1908), Paris (in 1909) and eventually, in New York.
• In 1928, she sold her business to Lehman brothers for $7.3m - but when the stock market crashed a year later she bought it back for $1.5m, a business move that helped her become one of the richest and most famous women in the world.
• In 1941, when she was told she couldn’t buy an apartment in her New York block because of her Jewish heritage, she thwarted the anti-Semitic residents by buying the entire building.
• When she died aged 93, her fortune was estimated at more than $100m.

Helena Rubinstein (born Chaja Rubinstein, 25th December 1872 – 1st April 1965)