Background
Elizabeth Arden was born on December 31, 1878 in Florence Nightingale Graham in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of William Graham, a market gardener on a leased farm, and Susan Tadd, who died when Arden was six.
Elizabeth Arden was born on December 31, 1878 in Florence Nightingale Graham in Vaughan, Ontario, Canada, the daughter of William Graham, a market gardener on a leased farm, and Susan Tadd, who died when Arden was six.
Her education in local schools ended before she completed high school.
Propelled by her name, Arden entered nursing, but she quickly abandoned the profession, declaring years later that she preferred helping well people maintain their health to caring for those who had lost it. The restlessness that ultimately helped make Arden the most successful woman entrepreneur in American history drove her from one low-paying job to another.
She joined her brother William in New York City in 1907, continuing her erratic employment pattern until 1908, when she secured a clerical job from Eleanor Adair, who specialized in facial massages. Sensing the possibilities in the beauty treatment field, Arden asked Adair to teach her how to give facials.
Having learned the technique, she was further encouraged when those on whom she practiced declared she had healing hands. Intent on capitalizing on her new skill, Arden joined Elizabeth Hubbard in 1909 and opened an upper-floor salon under Hubbard's name at 509 Fifth Avenue, New York City. When the two strong-minded women parted in 1910, Arden kept the salon with a $6, 000 loan from her brother and found a pleasing name for her enterprise by borrowing "Elizabeth" from her former partner and a surname from Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden. "
She furnished her salon with antiques and an Oriental rug, and after a four-year quest, ending in Paris, perfected a facial with which she was satisfied. Using a scientific approach, which was new to cosmetics, Arden conducted a parallel quest for a light, fluffy cleansing cream. She succeeded in 1914 when a chemist, A. Fabian Swanson, compounded the preparation she named Amoretta. That same year Arden launched her first branch salon in Washington, D. C.
In the years that followed, Arden opened more branches (including one in Paris in 1922) and developed new cosmetics and additional beauty treatments as she moved her premier salon up Fifth Avenue--to 673 in 1915 and 691 in 1930. In 1938 a reporter for Fortune magazine wrote that Arden "built her business on swank, ultra-exclusiveness and a line beautifully packaged and styled. "
The most popular of Arden's products was Velva Moisture Film, applied before makeup. Another best-seller was an astringent lotion called Ardena Skin Tonic. Arden, who had an excellent sense of color, mixed every new shade and tried each new preparation on herself, friends, and employees.
Declaring that "every woman has the right to be beautiful, " she insisted (despite the costly inventory) on providing a complete beauty service for a wide range of complexions and skin types. She introduced eye shadow and mascara to the United States in 1917, and in 1932 she began a line of lipsticks and other makeup to match the user's clothes. Arden was the creator of the cosmetics industry and changed the appearance of American women.
Although cosmetics sales brought Arden the bulk of her fortune, she also pioneered a system of exercises to maintain the body, some choreographed to popular music and others inspired by yoga. She made the first record on how to do exercises and had the first exercise room associated with a beauty salon. Procedures purporting to restore the skin included a course of thirty-two electrical shortwave treatments with her pink Ardena Youth Masque and a sweat-inducing coating of paraffin, applied from head to toe. Elizabeth Arden salons, located in the world's principal cities, were often unprofitable, but they gave her business the panache to put and keep it at the forefront of the cosmetics trade. The company, which prided itself on being exclusive, was a giant in reputation rather than in production.
Aware early of the importance of advertising, Arden told the American Advertising Federation that "repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers. " She exhibited an excellent sense of timing and based her business decisions on a shrewd knowledge of the psychology of women and on a practical grasp of what they would find appealing. Most of her customers were women over forty years old who reached for youth and beauty through her treatments.
Although all her salons had red doors, she considered pink the most flattering color in the spectrum. She usually wore pink and used it to decorate her homes and salons and in the packaging of all her products. Once she refused to use $100, 000 worth of cosmetics jars because they deviated slightly from the soft, pale, fabled shade of Arden pink. While vacationing in Maine in the early 1930s, Arden purchased a farm next to the home of her friend Elisabeth Marbury, a prominent literary agent who had introduced her to society.
Ever the entrepreneur, Arden named it Maine Chance Farm and by 1934 used it as a restorative beauty treatment center, where in luxurious surroundings clients were given individually prescribed low-calorie diets and exercises. The nutritionist Gaylord Houser worked out appetizing menus more reliant on vegetables and fruit than on meat and sweets. By insisting that youthfulness was an important ingredient of beauty, Arden contributed to the youth craze. But by advocating moderate exercise and a healthy diet she also helped older women remain active.
In 1947 she opened a winter center, Arizona Maine Chance Farm, in Phoenix, where customers included Ava Gardner and Mamie Eisenhower. Arden also established a Maine Chance Farm in Lexington, Ky. , for racehorses, making it possible for a biographer to say that she "made her fame and fortune from rich women and fast horses. " She bought her first racehorse in 1931 and remained an important figure in racing circles through the early 1960's, using the name Elizabeth N. Graham and often owning as many as 150 horses.
In 1945 her stables topped all others in prize money. The next year her horses got her featured on the cover of Time magazine, and in 1947 her horse Jet Pilot won the Kentucky Derby. Arden, who united cherry pink with white and blue for her racing colors, usually visited her horses twice a week and bought them cashmere blankets. She named her largest-selling perfume and her yearly charity ball Blue Grass in her horses' honor, and prescribed her own cosmetic preparations for their minor injuries and rubdowns.
She was said to treat "her women like horses and her horses like women". When a favorite horse to whom she was feeding an orange bit the tip off her right index finger in 1959, her arch rival Helena Rubinstein queried, "What happened to the horse?" In their fifty-year feud Rubinstein hired Thomas Lewis, Arden's former husband and sales manager, after Arden had coaxed away a dozen Rubinstein employees including Harry Johnson, whom Arden paid $50, 000 a year to be her general manager.
Arden employed a number of noble expatriates, including a Persian prince and a Russian general and later, during World War II, hired many Europeans whose lives had been disrupted by the war. In her cosmetics factories she also employed numerous blind workers and a much larger percentage of women than worked in similar jobs. In keeping her company the most efficient in the cosmetics industry, Arden was always exacting and often petulant and tyrannical. Although she readily fired workers and according to Fortune magazine she had a deserved reputation for training more people for "the competition than any other manufacturer in the business, " Arden consistently paid top wages and had many long-term employees on whom she lavished presents.
Always innovative and a firm believer in what she called "the concept of total beauty, " Arden started a fashion business in 1943. Oscar de la Renta was among those who created exclusive collections for her salons. In the 1950's Arden opened the first men's boutique attached to a beauty salon; earlier she had been the first major manufacturer of women's cosmetics to put out a line for men.
Arden, who insisted she was much younger, was nearly eighty-eight when she died in New York City. As the dowager empress of the beauty business Arden remained in command of her company until her death.
She was badgered by the Federal Trade Commission, limited by the Food and Drug and Robinson-Patman acts, and harassed by competitors, yet her company's sales ultimately reached over $60 million yearly. Arden left $4 million to numerous long-term employees, but the bulk of her $30 million to $40 million estate went to her family, particularly to her sister Gladys, Vicomtesse de Maublanc, who ran the Arden business in France, and to her niece and residual heir, Patricia Young, who for years had been her companion. To satisfy inheritance taxes, the business was sold to Eli Lilly and Company for $37. 5 million.
Quotations:
"Repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers. "
"I only want people around me who can do the impossible. "
"Nothing that costs only a dollar is not worth having. "
"Every woman has the right to be beautiful. "
Appearing far younger than her years, Arden, slim and five feet, two inches tall, with a legendary vitality, beautiful skin, and hair that slowly changed from reddish brown to blondish beige, was her firm's best advertisement.
Although Arden was fluttery in her movements and sometimes asked males for advice with a docile air, she was the absolute dictator and sole owner of her company. She argued and in her career proved that women were not incapable because of their sex or temperament of assuming managerial and executive duties.
On November 29, 1915, Arden became an American citizen when she married Thomas Jenkins Lewis. They had no children. For fifteen of the nineteen years of their marriage (which ended in divorce in 1934) he managed the wholesale department of what was fast becoming the Arden cosmetics empire, which in time would boast 300 products sold in forty-four countries.
Arden married Prince Michael Evlanoff, a Russian émigré, on December 30, 1942; they were divorced in 1944.