Word: helena
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...queen of the U.S. beauty business' billion-dollar-a-year empire is a short (4 ft. 10 in.), plump woman of 71 with a youthful complexion. When she is at work in her eight-story Fifth Avenue salon, she is Helena Rubinstein. At home, in her 26-room, three-floor Park Avenue apartment, crammed with about $1,000,000 worth of paintings (Matisse, Picasso, Dufy, etc.) and art treasures, she likes to be called Princess Gourielli (her husband is a Georgian nobleman turned businessman...
Last year, Helena Rubinstein Inc. sold $18 million worth of creams, lotions and perfumes in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Rubinstein salons and outlets abroad sold $12 million more. That was not enough for Helena Rubinstein. Last week, in Roslyn, N.Y., she opened a new $4,000,000 plant to put her beauty business on an assembly-line basis and triple her production. Made mostly of glass, it has dustproof floors, a sealed, odorproof room for testing perfumes, huge, stainless-steel mixing vats to churn up tons of cream and cologne, and machines to fill 1,000,000 bottles...
While boosting her quantity, Helena Rubinstein still keeps a sharp eye on the quality trade. In her salons, women who can afford to pay $25 for a "Day of Beauty" are stretched, exercised, rubbed, scrubbed, wrapped in hot blankets, bathed in infra-red rays, massaged, fed a lunch of 21 raw vegetables, then given a face treatment, pedicure, manicure, scalp treatment, shampoo and hairdo. But she candidly admits that most women can take care of their complexions with a couple of creams and ten minutes' daily attention. For her own skin she mainly uses a simple lotion, containing nothing...
...Girl from Cracow. The cream was made by a Hungarian doctor and sold in Cracow, Poland, where Helena Rubinstein was born, the eldest of eight daughters. At 18, she went to Australia to visit relatives, carrying some of the cream with her; she soon saw that windburned Australian ranch wives provided a market. She rented a Melbourne shop, sold $100,000 worth of the cream her first year, and bought the Hungarian's formula. She moved to London, opened a second salon, soon opened shops in Paris and New York...
...business was so big that Wall Street's Lehman Bros, paid her about $7,000,000 for two-thirds of the firm, in, corporated it, put its stock on the Curb, and went after mass markets. But, says Helena Rubinstein, "they thought they could do better selling everything for a dollar. They sold $50,000 worth more than I had and still made less profits. Some women won't buy anything unless they can pay a lot. They were ruining the business." Since the market crash had meanwhile driven the company's stock from...