Elizabeth Arden

• Born: December 31, 1884
• Birthplace: Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada
• Died: October 19, 1966
• Place of death: New York, New York

American cosmetics magnate

Arden used her early wealth to grow her line of cosmetics and open an ever-increasing number of salons and spas, thus making her brand one of the first highly successful, woman-owned businesses. This foresight ultimately made her one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs.

Sources of wealth: Manufacturing; sale of products

Bequeathal of wealth: Relatives; employees

Early Life

Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada, on December 31, 1884, the fourth of five children born to tenant farmers who had emigrated from Great Britain. Lacking the financial resources for college, she dropped out of high school but later enrolled in nursing school in Toronto. Despite the name “Florence Nightingale” (a famous nurse during the Crimean War), she soon realized that nursing was not the career for her.

Arden left Canada for good in 1908, living first with her brother, William, and getting her first taste of the cosmetics business. She married Thomas J. Lewis in 1915 and became an American citizen. Lewis acted as her business manager. After nearly twenty years of marriage, the couple divorced. She followed that with a two-year marriage to a Michael Evlonoff, a Russian prince.

First Ventures

Arden became convinced that women would be willing to spend large sums of money to enhance their looks, and she began developing creams in her spare time. She opened a salon with Elizabeth Hubbard but soon became the sole proprietor. Believing the name “Florence Nightingale” evoked the wrong image for a salon, she changed it to Elizabeth Arden. Some say she used her former partner’s first name; others believe she borrowed the name from Elizabeth I, queen of England. The surname “Arden” came from the poem Enoch Arden by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Arden traveled to France to study beauty and massage techniques used in the upscale Paris salons so she could offer her clientele the best services. She introduced eye makeup to the United States, and hers were the first salons to offer cosmetic makeovers, a marketing ploy still practiced in the beauty industry. From the start she understood the importance of spending money to make money and had the fortitude to make moves others would have deemed too risky.

Mature Wealth

By the 1930’s, Arden’s meteoric growth included salons in Europe and South America, as well as the United States and Canada. She concluded, correctly, that even in the most difficult of times, women who were able would continue buying beauty enhancement products. Her European ventures put her under suspicion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the agency’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, during World War II amid false rumors that the salons were used as fronts for Nazi Party operations.

Ever alert to new marketing possibilities, Arden developed a lipstick she named Montezuma Red to match the red trim on the uniforms of women in the armed forces, thus subtly planting the seed that wearing makeup to work was both acceptable and desirable.

The phenomenal success of Arden paved the way for other women to succeed in the beauty business, notably her first competitor, Helena Rubinstein. Their legendary rivalry lasted for decades, fueled in part when Arden’s former husband, Thomas J. Lewis, went to work for Rubinstein following their divorce. Rubinstein had acted in retaliation after Arden recruited her sales manager. That both women courted the same customers, and both succeeded, shows the scope of the industry Arden began. In the years that followed, Estée Lauder and others joined the industry that seemingly had no bounds.

From the earliest days of her career, Arden knew the socially privileged were her target market. By consistently developing exceptional products for that segment, she created a client list that included First Ladies Mamie Eisenhower and Jacqueline Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen Mother, and the almost royal Wallis Simpson, along with the elite of mid-1900’s Hollywood and Broadway. In the 1940’s, her annual sales reached $60 million.

Diversification became the key to her company’s growth, and, by association, the growth of her own substantial wealth. She began adding millinery and fashion to her mix of products and services. Oscar de la Renta was one of her first designers. Not content with salons alone, Arden turned her limitless energy to developing resort spas where women could be pampered for several weeks or longer. Her first spas were in New York and Arizona. She was ahead of the curve in other ways as well: She was the first, for example, to produce fragrances for men and to open a men’s boutique.

Arden indulged in another love, horses, and bred thoroughbreds, leading some to say she built her wealth on fast horses and rich women. Her horses included Jet Pilot, the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner. She used the name Elizabeth N. Graham in racing circles and owned close to 150 horses. In 1945, her Maine Chance Farm took in more prize money than any other American stable. After her death, Arden was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. She approached racing as she approached everything else—with total commitment—a living testament to one of her advertising slogans: “Hold fast to youth and beauty.” She named her first (and America’s first) fragrance “Blue Grass” after the Kentucky horse country surrounding her farm near Lexington.

Arden was above all a hard-driven businesswoman, with her hand in virtually every slice of her empire’s pie. Even so, she strove for an illusion of softness, probably to appear less intimidating. Whether it was due to the nature of her company, or just something she deemed a good business strategy, she retained a public persona of femininity. One way she accomplished this was by making pink her signature color, even to the extent of using it as one of her stable’s racing colors.

Arden died on October 19, 1966, in New York City, still the grande dame of the cosmetics industry. She is buried in Sleepy Hollow, New York, under the name Elizabeth N. Graham, a combination of her birth and professional names and the name she used in horse racing.

Legacy

One of Elizabeth Arden’s legacies is bringing the use of cosmetics into the mainstream. Formerly, such products were used primarily by actresses, prostitutes, and other women commonly looked down upon. Arden and others following in her footsteps, including rivals Helena Rubinstein and Estée Lauder, made it acceptable for a woman to enhance her appearance, and in so doing enhance her self-esteem. Her Red Door Salons, each with a uniformed doorman, serve a worldwide, upscale clientele, but less privileged women can buy lower-cost alternatives at their neighborhood drugstores. Once cosmetics gained acceptability, they paved the way for companies like Revlon, Max Factor, and the door-to-door marketer Avon Products, Inc.

As one of the first women entrepreneurs to achieve great wealth in a business climate dominated by men, Arden opened the door, if only a crack, for women who entered business, irrespective of their chosen industry. She proved conclusively that with a marketable idea, good business instincts, and dogged determination, there are no limits to what one can achieve.

Bibliography

Kearney, Mark, and Randy Ray. I Know That Name! The People Behind Canada’s Best Known Names from Elizabeth Arden to Walter Zeller. Toronto: Dundurm Press, 2002. A fun and fact-filled account of more than one hundred Canadian-born individuals who achieved great success and how the companies they founded turned them into household names. Arden is the one to beat when it comes to international name recognition.

Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Explains in detail “how women created the cosmetics industry and cosmetics created the modern woman.” Arden and Helena Rubinstein are key figures in the book, along with Avon Products, Inc., and other companies that cater to those with modest incomes.

International Directory of Company Histories. 117 vols. Chicago: St. James Press, 1988-2010. Volumes 8 and 40 contain information about Elizabeth Arden.

Woodhead, Lindy. War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden, Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2004. Fascinating, well-researched work describing the premier grandes dames of cosmetics, including their storied five-decade feud. The book is particularly interesting because their lives play out against London, Paris, and New York society—the source from which they drew their clientele. It also touches on such diverse subjects as the two world wars and the birth of modern advertising.