Estée Lauder

Josephine Esther Mentzer was born in 1908 in Corona, Queens, above her father's hardware shop, the child of Jewish immigrants from Hungary and what is now the Czech Republic. She hated being poor and foreign, and spent much of her later life polishing her origins; she would eventually admit that stories of a grand European childhood were invention.

What was true was her uncle John Schotz, a chemist who made face creams in a shed behind the house. As a teenager she helped him, and she began selling the jars to friends and then to beauty salons, demonstrating on the faces of women waiting under the dryers. She married Joseph Lauter in 1930, changed the spelling of the name, divorced him in 1939 and remarried him in 1942, after which they never parted.

In 1946 they founded Estée Lauder with four products, cooking the creams themselves. She persuaded Saks Fifth Avenue to place an order in 1948, and when she could not afford advertising she gave products away: samples with every purchase, and lipsticks handed out at charity lunches. Rivals called it a giveaway that would ruin her. Her Youth-Dew, a bath oil that doubled as scent, sold tens of thousands of bottles in 1953 and made the company.

She visited stores in person for decades, adjusting counters and touching customers' faces, and cultivated royalty and film stars with the same energy. She handed over to her son Leonard in the 1970s, though she kept turning up. The company went public in 1995. She died in 2004 at 95.