Helena Rubinstein reads in her bed in the late 1930s. Copyright Getty Images My first introduction to Helena Rubinstein came in the form of a small, white tube with a red and fuchsia logo that was no bigger than my thumb. It was waterproof mascara, hidden away in my mother’s bathroom drawer. She never actually…
Helena Rubinstein by Paul César Helleu, image via wikicommons Beauty is power and Madame Helena Rubinstein knew just what she was dispensing. Like all enchantments, beauty stirs up passions, its secrets can emancipate or enslave. Like power, beauty can be corrupting or creative; in the hands of an alchemist like Madame, it might even be…
NON FICTION In “Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oréal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good,” Ruth Brandon tells the story of Rubinstein, a self-made cosmetics tycoon who came from a poor Polish-Jewish background, and her battle with L’Oreal founder and Nazi collaborator Eugène Schueller, who acquired her company. The book delves into their lives, and…
In the world of beauty, Helena Rubinstein is still a legend, yet the details of the tycoon’s life, from her birth as Chaja Rubinstein in the Jewish Kazimierz district of Kraków, to her death in her mid-90s in 1965, are comparatively little-known. A new biography from Les éditions Grasset in Paris, “Helena Rubinstein: The Woman…
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