NEW YORK (AP) — Estee Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into an international cosmetics empire, has died. She was believed to be 95.
Mrs. Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest late Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokeswoman.
In 1998, Mrs. Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine’s list of the 20 most influential geniuses of business of the century. Her company placed No. 349 in the 2003 ranking in the Fortune 500 list of the nation’s largest companies, with revenue at $4.744 billion.
In explaining her success, the cosmetics queen once said: “I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.”
“Beauty is an attitude,” she said. “There’s no secret. Why are all brides beautiful? Because on their wedding day, they care about how they look. There are no ugly women — only women who don’t care or who don’t believe they’re attractive.”
The company’s product lines have included Estee Lauder, Clinique, Aramis, Prescriptives and Origins.
Mrs. Lauder enjoyed entertaining in the grand manner, in her Upper East Side townhouse, her oceanfront home in Palm Beach, Fla., her London flat and her villa in the south of France.
But that was not how she grew up.
Born Josephine Esther Mentzer in the working-class Corona section of Queens, she was the daughter of Max and Rose Schotz Mentzer. Mrs. Lauder never disclosed her birthdate, but biographer Lee Israel reported that it was July 1, 1908.
Mrs. Lauder said her family always called her Esty (pronounced ES-tee). When a public school official spelled it Estee, it stuck.
In 1930, she married a garment-center businessman named Joseph Lauter (later changed to Lauder), and they had their first son, Leonard, three years later.
During the 1930s, she began selling face creams that her uncle, a chemist, mixed up in a makeshift laboratory in a stable behind the family house. And she began experimenting with mixes herself.
Estee Lauder became a household name in 1953, when the company introduced Youth Dew, a bath oil and perfume. Over the years, she added new lines and new products, fragrances such as White Linen and Cinnabar, the Aramis line of men’s toiletries and the Clinique line of fragrance-free, allergy-tested products.
In 1995, the company, long tightly held by family members, announced plans to raise $335 million in an initial public stock offering.
Mrs. Lauder’s assets, including her company stock and much of her real estate, had been put in recent years into a trust administered by her two sons and a longtime lawyer. Her public appearances dwindled after she broke her hip in 1994.
Mrs. Lauder and her husband, now deceased, were active in philanthropic work, including contributions to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York and the University of Pennsylvania, the site of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.