The Ambition of Beauty Founder Helena Rubinstein (part one)

Deep Dive N°3, Part 1

Author

LaToya Allen
June 21, 2025

Welcome to The Strategy Files—a newsletter about history's most ambitious people in fashion, beauty, and culture. I study the icons, you apply their strategies; you win.

This month’s deep dive comes from the book My Life For Beauty by Helena Rubinstein.

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14 Lessons From This Month’s Deep Dive:

  1. Work like the version of you who's already built an empire. Helena’s work ethic, even in the beginning, was intense.

  2. Curiosity creates success.  Helena was endlessly curious about the things that made women look and feel beautiful. She asked them questions and embedded the answers into every part of her business. 

  3. Take bigger risks. Helena’s life would have been different if she hadn't dropped out of medical school, refused a marriage proposal, and moved to another country. 

  4. The path to building an empire is paved with persistence. For 70 years, whenever an obstacle got in her way, Helena either found a way around it or turned it into an opportunity.

  5. Build in public.  Helena wrote it in her 90s. She was still building her empire, and this book was her way of building in public. Imagine what she would have done with social media.

  6. Collaboration keeps you ahead.  Helena collaborated with chemists and doctors to develop her products, which other beauty founders didn't do at the time. 

  7. Study the businesses in your industry.  Helena went to Europe to study rare beauty treatments so she could incorporate them into her business.

  8. Reinvest your profits. She took the earnings from her first face cream (Valaze cream) and used profits to open a beauty salon. 

  9. Winners validate their ideas by talking to potential customers before going all in on their big ideas. Helena is no exception to that rule; she built an entire salon so she could do it.

  10. Better to sell a product that you know and understand.  That’s why the Lehman brothers lost millions of dollars after buying her business - and why she made after buying it back.

  11. You have to develop the skill to outwork the competition, even if you’re only competing against yourself.

  12. Change your location, change your life.  Helena moved from Poland to Australia, where there was a bigger demand for beauty products. If she’d stayed in Poland, Helena never would have been successful enough to write the book we are reading today. 

  13. Always be selling. Three pages in, she tells us that she still looks great for her age because she uses the Helena Rubinstein Color In A Bottle. I wonder how many bottles she sold just from mentioning it!

  14. Being realistic as a cage. Don’t put yourself in that cage. Helena didn’t have the right to vote or to open a bank account; starting a business wasn’t realistic.  But she did it anyway.

Helena Rubinstein was a woman who always made the bold move.

In 1896, at the age of 24, she moved to Australia from Poland with nothing but a killer wardrobe, a clear complexion, and 12 bottles of face cream. She opened her first beauty salon in 1902 and turned her venture into a global beauty empire worth over $100 million at the time of her death in 1965. 

That would be worth over a billion dollars today.

Her business survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and a rivalry with Elizabeth Arden that was so toxic that someone wrote a book about it called War Paint. 

WAR PAINT.

But the real question is, what did she do to create such long-lasting success? 

She did many things we can replicate.  But the first thing on her to-do list? Refuse an arranged marriage and move to a country with more opportunities than the one she was born in.

See you next week for part two,

LaToya

References && Further Reading

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