20 Beauty Empires That Turned Their Founders Into Millionaires

Born Sarah Breedlove to a formerly enslaved family, Madam C.J. Walker lost most of her hair to a serious scalp disorder during the 1890s. She converted her cure into a hair growth tonic, established a factory and training school in Indianapolis, and recruited thousands of commission agents across the country to sell the product. At her death in 1919, her estate was valued between $600,000 and $700,000. Walker is considered the first documented American female millionaire to have achieved this status on her own.

Coco Chanel was already a renowned Paris fashion designer when she decided to move into perfume. Perfumer Ernest Beaux formulated Chanel No. 5 for her in 1921. A few years later, Chanel entered into a partnership with Pierre and Paul Wertheimer, owners of the cosmetics company Bourjois, which would mass-produce and distribute the scent throughout the world. Chanel’s share of the business was limited to just 10 percent. Still, No. 5 went on to become the top-selling perfume in the world, and with renegotiated royalty payments, Chanel found herself one of the wealthiest women in the world.

In 1915, a young Chicago businessman called Thomas Lyle Williams saw his sister, Mabel, mix Vaseline with coal dust to blacken her eyelashes. He turned her trick into a cake mascara he named Maybelline, after her. Without a store of any kind, Williams advertised the new product in mail-order ads in movie magazines and sold it to women all over the U.S. He kept the company private for many years, eventually selling it for $136 million.

In 1909, Maksymilian Faktorowicz, known as Max Factor, came to Los Angeles to provide wigs and makeup for the fledgling motion-picture business. Stage makeup, usually made of heavy greasepaint, cracked under the bright studio lights, so Factor developed a pliable formula that appeared realistic on the screen and invented the term “make-up” to describe it. Factor then marketed the cosmetics to consumers, and within a few decades his company was serving both Hollywood and Main Street.

In Australia, Helena Rubinstein, a Polish immigrant, got her start selling a sheep-lanolin-based face cream in Melbourne. She divided skin into four types. She opened opulent salons in London, Paris, and New York. She sold her American enterprise to Lehman Brothers for $7.3 million and, months after the 1929 crash, bought it all back for less than $1.5 million, then ran her global empire for decades afterward.

Josephine Esther Mentzer, later Estée Lauder, established her cosmetics firm in New York with husband Joseph Lauder, marketing four skin care items made by her uncle, chemist John Schotz. She talked the manager of Saks Fifth Avenue into giving her counter space. She also created the “gift with purchase” concept and introduced the notion of salespeople performing makeovers on customers at counters. With her fragrance, Youth-Dew, a bath oil that was also perfume, she changed the way American women purchased fragrance.

In 1859, 22-year-old chemist Robert Chesebrough stopped by some of Pennsylvania’s new oil fields. Workers there rubbed a thick, waxy, colorless substance known as rod wax, the byproduct of oil drilling, onto their burns and cuts. Chesebrough spent more than 10 years refining the material in his Brooklyn laboratory. In 1870, he patented the process and named the odorless substance Vaseline. The entrepreneur hawked Vaseline from a horse-drawn wagon in and around New York, and became a multimillionaire, living to be 96 years old.

In 1932, Charles Revson, his brother Joseph Revson, and chemist Charles Lachman established Revlon in New York. The “L” came from Lachman. Rather than translucent dye stains, the Revsons employed opaque nail pigments taken from auto paint, coordinating the color of nail polish with lipstick in tones such as “Fire and Ice.” Salon distribution and sponsorship of the TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question, saw the business blossom. When it was publicly offered in 1955, Revson was one of the wealthiest executives in America.

Elizabeth Arden, originally named Florence Nightingale Graham and a Canadian citizen, had a salon called the Red Door open on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1910 under the name Elizabeth Arden. She favored light, “scientific” skin care rather than heavy makeup, introduced eye cosmetics to mainstream American women, and encouraged women to match their lipstick with their nail polish. In the 1930s, Red Doors were found in big cities all over the world, and Arden’s wealth from her beauty empire helped support Maine Chance Farm, an elite racehorse stable.

In 1907, Eugène Schueller, a French chemical engineer, created a non-toxic synthetic hair dye in his Paris apartment and registered the business that became L’Oréal two years later. He began selling his safer hair dyes to salon owners throughout Paris and branched out to include hair care, soap, and sunscreens. That slow, methodical expansion from salon to salon would ultimately lead to the creation of the world’s biggest cosmetics company.

In 1898, Anthony Overton, born into slavery in 1865 and educated as a lawyer and a chemist, started a cosmetics firm that later relocated to Chicago. The company created the first nationally popular facial powder for Black people, which was later shipped across the world to places such as Liberia and Japan. He then used his profits to launch a bank and an insurance company, becoming one of the wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs of his time.

Annie Turnbo Malone was a chemist who invented a gentler scalp and hair treatment for Black women around 1900, creating a door-to-door sales business in St. Louis. In 1918, she opened a facility with a training school, factory, salon, and auditorium. There she trained tens of thousands of sales agents throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, including a young Madam C.J. Walker before Walker established her own enterprise. She also became a recorded Black female millionaire and one of the most prominent African American philanthropists of her time.

Chicago socialite Harriet Hubbard Ayer found herself destitute after her divorce. Returning to New York in 1886, she took out a $50,000 loan to start a cosmetic company that sold a cream named after a French socialite. She soon added powders, soaps, and perfumes, using celebrity testimonials and newspaper ads. Ayer paid off her loan early, but a suit brought by her male backers ended up costing her the company in 1893. She later became a widely-read beauty columnist.

Eugène Rimmel began selling scented mouthwashes, bath powders, and perfumed vaporizers at age 14, when he opened a luxury perfumery with his father on London’s Bond Street in 1834. In the mid-1800s, he formulated the first non-toxic packaged cake mascara, created out of purified petroleum jelly and powdered coal. The company’s brand spread across Europe, and “rimmel” became the common term for mascara in French, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Arabic.

Sara Spencer Washington opened a small beauty salon in Atlantic City in 1913. Her hair and cosmetics company was born six years later. Sara formulated the pressing oils, pomades, lipsticks, and perfumes, selling them via door-to-door agents and opening beauty colleges throughout the US, the Caribbean, and South Africa. By 1939, she had been honored at the New York World’s Fair and employed over 45,000 agents around the world.

François Coty, whose real name was Joseph Marie François Spoturno, was born on the island of Corsica. When he started his perfume business in Paris, he made a wager: middle-class customers would pay for a luxury scent if the bottle looked the part. With the help of glass artist René Lalique, Coty produced scents such as La Rose Jacqueminot and later mass-produced products like his face powder. Before long, Coty had factories in multiple countries and became one of the wealthiest men in France.

In 1872, Arinobu Fukuhara, a former Japanese Navy pharmacist, opened the country’s first Western-style pharmacy in the Ginza area of Tokyo. In 1897, he created Eudermine, a scientifically formulated skin lotion intended to shield women from the damage caused by their heavily lead-laced cosmetics. Over time, Fukuhara and his son Shinzo Fukuhara, who would later take over the company, combined Western science with Japanese beauty. They broadened their product range to include face powders and fragrances, turning Shiseido into one of the largest cosmetics empires in Asia.

The French doctor and chemist Pierre-François-Pascal Guerlain began mixing custom scents and balms for the French aristocracy when he opened his first perfume shop on Paris’s Rue de Rivoli in 1828. In 1853, he concocted Eau de Cologne Impériale for Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, which won him the moniker of official perfumer to the French court. The Guerlain family continued to operate the perfume house for four generations, accumulating considerable wealth along the way before the business was eventually bought by the luxury conglomerate LVMH.

Armand Petitjean apprenticed with the perfumer François Coty and founded Lancôme in Paris in 1935, presenting five of its perfumes at the Brussels World’s Fair as a counterattack against burgeoning American beauty companies. His 1936 moisturizing cream Nutrix was a perennial bestseller. In 1942, Petitjean established a school that taught aspiring Lancôme brand ambassadors how to market its high-end skin-care products around the globe. L’Oréal bought Lancôme in 1964.

Hazel Bishop set out to find a lipstick that wouldn’t rub off on your partner. For years, she tinkered at night in her kitchen until, by 1949, she had developed a lip tint that was kiss-proof: it contained bromo-acid dyes, which didn’t dry out the lips. She co-founded her company and pitched it on television with the tagline “Stays on you… not on him.” Sales reached more than $10 million a year. But after a proxy battle, she was forced out of the company she started. Later in life, she worked as a Wall Street analyst specializing in the beauty business.

This content was created with the help of AI.