Yahrtzeit! Helena Rubinstein

Since the subject of face creams and products of beauty, applied and adhered have been floating around mitten drinnen, an homage is surely fitting.










Madame Helena Rubinstein died on this day, 1965. The following is taken from Andrew Tobias' Fire and Ice. If you've never read this book, find it....it's great.






















Madame Rubinstein thought the nail man (Charles Revson) "heartless." She was anguished by the way he would copy her products ("only better!"). But he fascinated her. She couldn't help admiring him. She even bought Revlon stock.

They were not so dissimilar, Madame and the nail man. She, too, was an earthy, idiosyncratic, impossible, tyrannical Jewish founder/one-man-show. She hired people, milked them, and fired them. She played one off the other. She burped unabashedly and blew her nose in her bed sheets. She felt surrounded by ingratitude. She complained bitterly about having to close the office after John Kennedy's assassination. Unlike Revson, however, she was not out to prove herself to anyone, she did not live in fear of being embarrassed, and she was thoroughly-ludicrously-cheap. Yet far better liked than Charles, for all his lavish entertaining. Her quirks were seen as amusing rather than gauche or offensive. No one called her ruthless, although she did have much the same obsession with her business that Charles did.

For many years it was not he but "the other one"-(Elizabeth) Arden- whose competition most irked Madame Rubinstein. Arden once raided virtually the entire Rubinstein sales staff. Madame retaliated by hiring Arden's ex-husband as her sales manager. At least the nail man and she were in largely separate fields. He had the lipstick and nails markets, yes, but Madame was the queen of treatment creams. It was only in 1962, when Revson launched Eterna 27, the remarkable skin cream, that Madame felt really threatened. A Rubinstein executive walked into her office that day to find the window open wide and Madame leaning out, screaming and shaking her fist. Her third-floor office was directly opposite 666 Fifth Avenue, where Revson ruled the twenty-seventh floor (hence the name- Eterna 27). This tiny ninety-year-old woman was screaming up at him in a very heavy Polish accent, "What are you doing? You're killing me, you rat! What's the matter with you?" It looked as though she might fall out of the window. "Don't worry about it, Madame," the Rubinstein executive said, pulling her back in and hoping to cheer her up, "it's not going to sell. In fact, I think they're going to change the name to Returna." She looked at him blankly. Like Charles (Revson), she had very little sense of humor about her business. "Why would they want to do that?" she said. "It's a good name, Eterna."

Later that year Madame met Revson briefly at a fashion gathering. Her comment afterward: "He has an awful skin."