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Fluids & Secrets. The industry is a sharply competitive world of calculated eccentricities in which only the books are always well balanced. It is a pink jungle of feuds and jealously guarded secrets in which people and ideas are pirated. The oldest feuders are two of the best-known names in cosmetics: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden (real name: Florence Nightingale Graham).
Helena Rubinstein started in Melbourne, Australia, in 1902 with a batch of homemade face cream from her native Poland, made $1,000,000 before she was 25, and invaded the U.S. in 1915, billing herself "The World's Greatest Beauty Culturist." She is now worth at least $100 million, collects paintings in her 26-room Park Avenue triplex, and has 14 portraits of herself by artists ranging from Dufy to Dali.
Elizabeth Arden studied to be a nurse, entered the cosmetics business because, she says, she wanted to make women beautiful as well as healthy. Before opening her own beauty salon in 1910, she spent an apprenticeship as secretary in a Fifth Avenue beauty shop. Today she grosses an estimated $15 million yearly, owns a topflight racing stable (Maine Chance). The carefully preserved beauty queens are the best ads for their own products: Rubinstein is in her 80s, Arden in her 70s—and their exact ages are as jealously guarded as their cosmetic secrets. Says an aide: "We never talk to Miss Arden about the passage of time."
Some 74,000 women a year are soothed, massaged and coifed in Madame Rubinstein's Manhattan salon, headquarters of her three-continent chain. A woman who wants to spend an entire day at the salon can spend up to $120 for a series of treatments that would make a siren out of a Westchester matron. First, she is told to change into a black leotard, given paper slippers and a white robe to wear. Her medical history is solemnly taken ("Any operations? How many children?"). After doing exercises in front of a mirror under direction of a Ph.D. from Vienna ($12), she hops into a 3O-minute bubble bath with froth 3 ft. high ($5). Her skin is then defuzzed of superfluous hair by a wax treatment ($26). She can have an infrared treatment ("Detoxicates—very effective after a good drinking night") at $10 or a paraffin application at $15 to lose a pound or two. Then comes a facial, in which her face is coated with cream ("Voilaá, I begin"), massaged ("Facial care begins at the collarbone") and sprayed with a salty liquid for "disturbed skin" ($9). To top it off she goes to a treatment by Michel, who "sketches" the hairdo he thinks best for her, gives her a permanent, then fluffs, smooths and fusses her hair into place ($35). The final touch: she can have artificial fingernails applied for $17.50.