Thanks to a combination of business savvy, breathtaking chutzpah, and lucky timing, Helena Rubinstein managed to transform herself from a poor Polish emigrant to the world's first self-made female tycoon. She went from selling homemade "Crème Valaze" out of her house in Australia to becoming an international cosmetics magnate. Tiny and plump, wearing extravagant jewels and spiked heels, she was a fixture of upper-crust New York for many years. She was larger than life, and never took no for an answer: when she was refused from a New York City apartment on the grounds that she was Jewish, she went ahead and bought the whole building and promptly moved in.
The story of Eugène Schueller and L'Oréal begins in 1907, in a dingy working-class part of Paris, where a young Schueller sat at his family's kitchen table trying to develop the first harmless artificial hair dye. The tale of how L'Oréal went from that point to the world's largest cosmetics company is fascinating and full of intrigue, with a little of everything: fascist assassins, bitter unmaskings, political scandals. In 1988, although Schueller and Rubinstein had long since passed away, their worlds collided when L'Oréal bought Rubinstein's company - leading to a series of scandals that threw a new and sinister light on L'Oréal. For starters, Rubinstein was Jewish, but Schueller and many other top L'Oréal executives had been active Nazi collaborators. What came to light threatened the reputations of some of France's most powerful men - up to and including its president.
The fairy story in question was a classic rags-to-riches tale. Twelve years earlier, in 1903, Helena Rubinstein, a poor emigrant from Poland, had opened her first beauty salon: a single room in Melbourne, Australia, from which she sold pots of homemade face cream. So great were her marketing skills, such the demand, and so enormous the markup, that within two years she was rich. By 1915 she was a millionaire. She had dazzled London and Paris, and was set to do the same in America. Fairy stories, however, are more than just dazzling social leaps. They are also dramatizations of our deepest dreams. And in this sense, too, the metaphor was apposite, both for Rubinstein and for her chosen industry. For cosmetics are all about dreams-specifically, the dream of an ideal, time-defying physical self.
