An Industry Born on A Sheeps Back
Memories With Ivor Jones & Friends
When the Macarthurs introduced Merino sheep to Australia little did they know that it would lead to a worldwide industry that became popular with women everywhere. A Polish immigrant in 1896, Helena Rubenstein, with no money and very poor English language skills, arrived in Melbourne.
From Melbourne, she moved to Coleraine in Western Victoria where she had an uncle who was a shopkeeper. There she found some 75 million sheep who produced copious quantities of lanolin, grazing around the countryside.
She used the lanolin as a beauty aide on herself and experimented by adding lavender, pine bark and water lilies to hide the pungent odour of the lanolin. After falling out with her uncle, she found employment as a bush governess.
She later moved back to Melbourne finding employment as a waitress at the Winter Garden Tearooms. There, an admirer provided her with funds to launch Crème Valaze, supposedly including herbs from the Carpathian Mountains in Europe. The cost of production of a single jar was 10 pence and was then sold for six shillings. She could soon afford to open a salon in fashionable Collins Street.
Sydney was next, and within five years she also had a salon in London which she financed with $100,000 of her own money. Women could not obtain bank loans at the time. In 1908, her sister, Ceska, took over the Melbourne operation and, at the same time, Helena, who had moved to London in 1908, married Polish born American journalist Edward William Titus who also set up a small publishing company and helped Helena’s company by writing publicity for the salons.
Titus’ publishing company is probably best known for publishing “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”. Titus and Rubenstein moved to Paris and again established yet another salon in 1912 to add to their growing empire. As Rubenstein and Titus were Jewish, they decided to leave Paris and move to New York at the outbreak of World War 1. In 1915 she opened a cosmetics salon in New York which became the forerunner of a chain across the United States. In 1917 Rubenstein took on the manufacturing and wholesale distribution of her products to other salons and retailers.
Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden became intense rivals with both using the perceived value of packaging and overpricing and the pseudoscience and promotion of skincare. Rubenstein saying of Arden “With her packaging and my product we could have ruled the world”. Both were social climbers who died within eighteen months of each other.
Rubenstein sold the American business to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million in 1928 only to buy it back during the Great Depression for less than $1 million. She went on to increase the value of the company to $100 million.
During 1938 Titus and Rubenstein divorced and she then married Prince Artchil Gourielli- Tchkonia who claimed to be a member of Georgian nobility and whose grandmother was Princess Gourielli, thus enabling Helena Rubenstein to also use the title of Princess Gourielli as the wife of the Prince.
Helena Rubenstein died in New York on April 1, 1965 aged 92.
In 1973 the company of Helena Rubenstein Inc. was sold to Colgate-Palmolive and the brand started to fade so it was sold once more to L’Oreal who closed the US operations and repositioned the brand as a high-end franchise in international markets, with the exception of the US where the brand is no longer available.
The takeover of Helena Rubenstein business by L’Oreal was controversial as it had been engineered by Jacques Correze, an ex-Nazi, who had expropriated Jewish property during the war, and that the founder of L’Oreal, Eugene Schueller, had also been a Nazi collaborator.
From the sheep of Coleraine in Victoria, Polish refugee Helena Rubenstein built a worldwide business of beauty and skincare.
