Helena Rubinstein

Helena Rubinstein was born in Kraków, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in 1872, the eldest of eight daughters of a Jewish shopkeeper. In her early twenties, to avoid a marriage her family had arranged, she left for Australia to stay with relatives, taking with her a small stock of a rich face cream made by a chemist known to her mother, intended for the harsh climate.

In Melbourne she found a market she had not expected: the wind and sun of the Australian outback left many women's skin badly damaged, and her cream sold well beyond family circles. She opened a beauty salon in Melbourne in 1902, quickly expanded to Sydney, then moved to Europe, opening salons in London and Paris where she developed further products and refined techniques for advising clients on skin type, an idea not widely marketed before.

She emigrated again to the United States around the outbreak of the First World War, building Helena Rubinstein Incorporated into a company with salons, factories and products sold across department stores in America and, eventually, dozens of countries. She was an aggressive self-promoter, cultivating a public image as "Madame" and commissioning portraits from major artists, at a time when few women ran international manufacturing companies at all, let alone as sole founders.

She continued running the company into her nineties, sold at auction some of the art and jewellery she had collected, and died in New York in 1965, having built one of the first cosmetics businesses to operate as a genuinely worldwide brand.