Helena Rubinstein by Michele Fitoussi: book review

Helena Rubinstein: the woman who invented beauty (2010, this edition 2012) is the biography of the wealthy business-woman.

Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) was born in Krakow, Poland. After emigrating to Australia in 1896, she turned being born poor, foreign, and Jewish into business strengths. She opened her first beauty institute in Melbourne in 1902, started a marketing campaign in 1904, and created visionary beauty treatments, with an emphasis on cosmetics, moisturising, sun protection, massage, hydrotherapy, hygiene, nutrition, physical exercise, and cosmetic surgery.

She was known to be one of the richest women in the world, self-made, with only a handful of peers in the beauty industry: Coco Chanel, Elizabeth Arden, and Estee Lauder.

This biography takes readers through different eras, countries, wars, fashions, and moral standards, from the belle epoque in Europe, 1910s London, the artistic and literary Montparnasse area of Paris, and pre-war New York, to the 1950s and 60s. It takes readers from Rubinstein’s personal dramas, heartbreaks, tragedies, and solitude, exposing her faults, her charms, and her ability to tell a good lie. Fitoussi does this through documents, autobiographies, biographies, newspaper articles, business papers, and personal testimonies of both the dead and the living.

On her voyage to Australia, Chaja Rubinstein changed her name to Helena Juliet and her age from 24 to 20. She had 12 jars of her mother’s face cream and a belief that hard work helps to ‘keep a woman young.’ By the age of 40 she ‘looked thirty-five and told people she was thirty.’

Learning from mentors throughout her career, she was eager to be updated on current health and beauty techniques, keen to make beauty not just the preserve for the elite.

Fitoussi describes Rubinstein’s family involvements in her business, the men who helped her, her 30-year marriage to Edward William Titus, her two sons Roy and Horace, her marriage to Georgian Prince Artchil Gourielli-Tchkonia, and her 15-year professional relationship with her assistant Patrick O’Higgins (whom she hired when she was 80 years old). Marrying Artchil in 1938, the same year she divorced Edward, is covered in detail - at 66 she married 43 year old Artchil, 23 years her junior, while Edward married a Swiss girl 48 years his junior.

With seven younger sisters – Pauline, Rosa, Regina, Stella, Ceska, Manka, and Erna – Helena had a veritable supply of helpers. Although generous, she was also authoritarian, a hard task master, and short-tempered. Her rivalry with the American star of the beauty industry, Elizabeth Arden, is well documented.

Fitoussi also describes Rubinstein’s homes, art collections, fashion purchases, and her love of culture – all of which provided inspiration for her beauty products. From Australia to London to Paris to New York, she established a lifestyle through good times and war years to continually re-invent the needs and desires of women as their emancipation evolved throughout history. ‘Launched in Australia, improved in Europe and perfected in the United States, the Rubinstein technique was infallible.’

This comprehensive, easy-to-read, lengthy biography leaves no mascara or beauty cream unturned, from childhood to the legacy of her company after her death at the age of 93. It’s an interesting read.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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