Stories from the science and history of cosmetics, skin care and early Beauty Culture.

Beauty Firms

Eleanor Adair

We know very little about Eleanor Adair the person, other than that she was born in Ireland in 1867 and from 1900 opened salons in London, Paris, Nice, Brussels, Birmingham and New York. She also introduced Florence Graham (Elizabeth Arden) to the beauty business.

Armand Company

The Armand Company was founded by Carl Weeks in 1916. By 1927 it was the leading seller of face powder in the United States and, with revenues of $2.5 million, had an annual income exceeding that of either Elizabeth Arden or Helena Rubinstein at the time.

Hazel Bishop

Founded in 1948 on a single product, a no-smear lipstick, the company had a meteoric rise in the United States in the 1950s due to advertising on network television. However, its heyday did not long outlast the involvement of its founder, Hazel Bishop.

Chesebrough Manufacturing Company

Chesebrough began selling Vaseline Petroleum Jelly in 1870. However, wholesale or retail druggists were largely disinterested in it. Sales were slow until he began sending out employees with carts to hand out free samples to housewives and doctors.

Covermark

The Covermark line of cosmetics was developed because its founder, Lydia O’Leary, suffered from a large, raspberry-coloured birthmark that covered half of the left-hand side of her face.

Cyclax

In 1896, Frances Forsythe – using the name Mrs. Frances Hemming – opened an establishment in a converted front room of a house at 58 South Molton Street, London, to discretely sell beauty products.

Dorothy Gray

Dorothy Gray was born Dorothy Cloudman in Gorham, Maine where she grew up on a farm. After moving to New York she worked for Elizabeth Arden as a treatment girl before opening her New York salon on 753 Fifth Avenue in 1916.

Maybelline

The rise of Maybelline from a small mail-order firm to a global cosmetics business is impressive. Its early fortunes, like those of Max Factor and the Westmore Brothers, were tied with the growing motion picture business in California.

Pompeian Manufacturing Company

In 1901, Fred W. Srecher registered the name ‘Pompeian Massage Cream and Skin Food’ for a cream he had spent many months formulating. By the end of the decade ‘Pompeian Massage Cream’, as it came to be know, was the best-selling face cream in the United States.