EP251. From Kitchen Formulator to Global Icon – The Story of Elizabeth Arden

The mainstream beauty industry at times has a tendency of speaking down to indie beauty formulators and entrepreneurs. Now don't get me wrong, it's improved a bit over the last decade, but that slight tinge of superiority is still there. And it's part of the reason that some people and some organisations get very uncomfortable whenever they hear us at Formula Botanica say, you don't have to be a chemist to formulate. And yes, we've received plenty of complaints about this short statement over the years, but we are sticking to our guns because you have to be a chemist to make safe, stable and sellable beauty products. And the great irony is that the beauty entrepreneurs that gave rise to today's modern beauty industry understood this all too well. And they were so similar to today's indie beauty formulators, except of course, they had fewer opportunities, both in the industry itself, but also as women. I'm talking about Estee Lauder, Helena Rubinstein, Madam C.J. walker and the absolute powerhouse of an entrepreneur that was Elizabeth Arden. She has an amazing, inspiring story and it's one that you need to hear. That's why today I'm honoured to be joined by Professor Stacey Cordery who's just authored a phenomenal new book called Becoming Elizabeth the Woman behind the Global Beauty Empire. It's a brilliant read. I'm halfway through it myself and I am absolutely loving it. And I keep finding myself smiling every time I pick up Stacey's book because the parallels between Florence Nightingale Graham, which was Elizabeth Arden's actual name, and the modern day indie beauty sector, well, those parallels are striking. The drive, the determination, the need to make women feel better about themselves, it's all there. And that's why I want you to settle in for this interview because you're going to see exactly why history just so much about ourselves. And then once you've listened to the whole interview, I want you to go and buy Stacy's book because it's brilliant and it deserves a place on your bookshelves. I and the link for that book is in the show notes with this episode. So let's get started. Welcome to Green Beauty Conversations in which I challenge the beauty industry to become more sustainable, champion, independent and green beauty and encourage you to join me in changing the beauty industry for the better. I'm your host, Lorraine Dallmeyer. I'm a chartered environmentalist, biologist and the CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school form Formula Botanica. We have tens of thousands of students in over 190 countries around the world who study with us to become organic beauty formulators and entrepreneurs, Visit our website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you want to be the first person to know what's happening in green beauty, make sure you subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app. So in today's episode, I'm joined by Stacy Cordery, professor of history and director of undergraduate studies at Iowa State University and author of Becoming Elizabeth the Woman behind the Global Beauty Empire. Stacey is a historian and a biographer and the author of multiple books not just about Elizabeth Arden, but also about Alice Roosevelt Longworth. From White House princess to Washington power broker Juliet Gordon Lowe, the remarkable founder of the Girl Scouts, as well as two books about Theodore Roosevelt. And she knows all about the life and stories of Elizabeth Arden. So let's get started. Hi, Stacey, how are you doing?

I'm just wonderful and so excited to be on your show. Thank you so much for having me.

Oh, I'm thrilled that you're here, and I absolutely love your book and I love everything that you've created. But let's start. For the listeners who aren't familiar with Elizabeth Arden, could you please just give us a brief synopsis of who this incredible entrepreneur was and what she built?

Elizabeth Arden was born Florence Nightingale Graham sometime in the 1880s in Canada. Very poor family. And in 1910, she, by 1910, she made her way to the United States because there weren't a lot of opportunities in Canada for her. She opened her first salon after having worked for women in New York City who were called beauty culturalists. And she learned from these beauty culturalists how to do, in essence, what was a brand new career. She had a opening. Her timing was really brilliant. Throughout her entire career, she had an opening into a new thing that happened because of industrialization. In part, the touching of another woman's skin is a very intimate act. And this had always been done in a home before. But by the time many folks had moved around, changed continents or cities and so forth, there was a need for looking better in these new jobs. And Elizabeth Arden was very good at seeing opportunities and trends long before other people did. So she got herself hired on as a beauty culturalist assistant, learned the trade, and then opened her own salon. When she did that, she was very intentional about her audience, intentional about building her business. She wanted away from poverty, but she also was passionate about this idea of being able to make every woman more beautiful. And her definition of beauty wasn't just skin deep. We could say it went beyond that. So in short, Order. She created a salon that attracted elite women from New York City. It was not very long until she had introduced really forward looking items to her salon, including makeup, which I'm sure we'll talk about later. And then she expanded and expanded and expanded. She created a brand around some certain concepts that lasted her entire career, like the Arden look and the color Arden pink and the idea of cleanse, tone, nourish. She was committed to spending a lot of money on advertising and luxurious packaging. And so she developed this very high quality product, a very high quality salon, and then ultimately spa experience until her name became synonymous with luxury and she was available around the globe. Her products were literally available in places like Tibet and Buenos Aires. And she survived both world wars and remained relevant until the end of her career, which is. Which came with her death in 1966.

Wow. I mean, what a phenomenal story. And I know we're going to go into more facets of her story, but what attracted you to writing the book about her in the first place? What was your first experience with Elizabeth Arden?

Oh, well, this is a fun story. When I was a young teenager, my mother said, stacey, I have signed us up for a mother daughter event at the Elizabeth Arden salon. And I thought, this is wonderful. Didn't know what it would be about, but I was game. And so this Mother Daughter Day was basically a big seminar where we learned the Arden skincare routines. We learned about Arden products, but we also had a ton of fun with other mothers and daughters. And when we left, we took our little bag of bling with us and some products we bought. And that was great. But my mother said, the reason we're doing this is because it's time you learned about how to take care of your skin. And she believed, like just about every other woman in America at the time, that no one knew more about skin care than he lives with Arden. And so I still use concepts and products that I learned about that day. But as I look back on this, what I really think was going on is that my mother's hidden agenda, if you will, tapped into another thing for which Arden was famous beyond skincare, and that is the Arden look. The Arden look was an elegant, sophisticated accent on minimalist makeup. And this was the early 1970s, when I was wedded to a lot of bright blue eyeshadow and green mascara worn at the same time, which I thought was awesome. But I think my mom, that was a little over the top. So I got a little lesson in skincare, but probably a bigger lesson in makeup.

I Think the blue and green sounds phenomenal, personally, but bring it back.

Think I could bring that back? I don't know.

I think we should. I think we should. So one of the things that I found fascinating about Elizabeth Arden's story was the fact that she began her career really as a woman working in the kitchen, experimenting with formulas, which is very relevant to what we do and very much relevant to, to the listeners of this podcast as well. And I think it mirrors the journey of many modern day beauty entrepreneurs. So how do you think her humble beginnings really shaped her approach to beauty in general?

Well, I think it's important to realize, I'm going to put my historian cap on at the moment, that women had access to what were essentially big cookbooks. And in these cookbooks there were not just recipes for your pork roast, but also for products. So women could easily find recipes about soaps and dentifrices. Right. Toothpaste. So this was available to her. I think that the way it shaped Elizabeth Arden, though, was that it made her comfortable with this. I mean, it was not. She didn't enter. You know, automobiles were pretty new at this time too. She didn't go into car sales. She went into something with which she was familiar. So it was turn in her career when she embraced something that I think is still very much a part of skincare and makeup today. And that is a scientific overlay that suggested that she knew more about skin care and about skincare products and about the health of the skin than your grandmother did or your aunt did. And so the scientific overlay becomes part of the kind of arcane knowledge that a beauty culturalist has and that you would want to pay for. Because otherwise, like I said before, this time, you could have done it yourself.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I actually have some of those cookbooks as well. I found some of them and they are truly fascinating. You're quite right. Let's paint more of a picture then, around how cosmetics were viewed at the time, because I think that will really put her achievements into some stark light as well. How was skincare, how was makeup viewed at this time when she really started.

To take off in the United States of America? The only women who Wore makeup in 1910, 1914, were prostitutes and sex workers wore makeup in large measure to cover skin diseases that they would have had. The sexually transmitted diseases sometimes appeared in the skin. There was that part of it. And the other part of it was that if you wore makeup to cover up something that was bad or ugly or wrong, this was a false face. And so if you put on a false face and you lied about who you essentially were by covering this up, you were not trustworthy in any other area. You certainly weren't trustworthy as a potential wife, and you were not, not going to be a good mother. Particularly high society really rejected any kind of makeup they even thought of makeup. It was a hard, hard, hard line. And it was everywhere. It was in sermons, it was in magazines, you find it in newspapers. Anyone who dared to go beyond a little bit of rice powder that they concocted themselves really had transgressed in society.

Wow, that is unbelievable when you compare it to where we are today. So then what motivated Elizabeth Arden to move into makeup when color cosmetics in particular were viewed in such a negative light?

By 1914 or so, Elizabeth Arden had built up her salon to such a degree that she had a great salon manager, she had trained all of her treatment girls, as they were called, and she had a terrific accountant. So she could basically leave her New York salon. And she went to the center of beauty culture with Europe, of course, in the west at least. And so she discovered in Paris that the women she observed in the cafes, at the Opera had a certain look to them, we might say a certain je ne sais quoi. What was behind this? She really studied them, and to her amazement, what they had that American women didn't have was a little bit of makeup judiciously applied, just enough to give them that kind of oomph. And so she thought, because you can never forget, that what Elizabeth Arden was, was a highly, spectacularly successful capitalist. She thought, if I take these makeups home, tweak them a bit, and then train myself and my clients how to use them, I will have something that no other beauty culturalist had. And she was very brave, but she was also extraordinarily self confident. So she did exactly that. She filled her suitcase, she brought these products home, and little by little, she trained her bravest clients in how to apply these. And once they strode out into the, you know, the Metropolitan Opera here in New York City, their friend said, oh, you look fabulous. And she then they would have to say, Elizabeth Arden. Go to Elizabeth Arden. And people did.

Absolutely genius. I love this. What an. She was an incredible entrepreneur. She also believed, and this comes across very strongly in your book, that beauty should empower women. So how did she weave this into the very DNA of her brand?

Beauty is power sounds really trite today, I think, and it gets repeated a lot. But for Elizabeth Arden, it was a mantra. She really believed it. But for Arden, the power was not the power to attract a man. And trust me, in this book I wrote, I have looked at six decades worth of advertisements. Almost none of them have anything to do with catching a man. For Elizabeth Arden, Beauty is Power meant that a woman who felt good, who felt she looked good, could conquer the world. Literally anything she wanted to do. She would take with her a self confidence that came out of feeling and looking good. And that was beauty. That's what Beauty Is Power meant for Arden. So her whole system was about teaching women. She was fanatical about education, teaching women about how to cleanse, to nourish, how to keep their skin healthy, how to apply makeup in a way that made them feel good and self confident and ready to take on whatever task it was. And she didn't care whether your task was, you know, running a corporation like she did or running your family. It didn't matter. She wanted you to feel good about yourself. So that's what Beauty is Power meant. But of course, there's a whole other aspect to Beauty is Power, because as a CEO of an ever enlarging company, she empowered the women she employed. She empowered the clients who came in equally. So I think there's a whole. We could spend a lot of time talking about how she ran her company, but that was also about power. She opened up doors to women at every level, from the treatment girls to her, you know, vice president around the globe, and she paid them extraordinarily well. And there's a, I think, a really important sense of empowerment there as well.

Wow. How significant do you think that message of empowerment was for women at the time?

Hugely, hugely significant, because in 1910, when she opened her salon, remember, no woman could vote. A woman couldn't have a bank account on her own without the help of a man. She couldn't rent a space to open a salon, almost always without the help of men, unless she was a widow. And so to have a woman say, you can do anything you want. Let me help you do this, it must have been extraordinarily. Well, we know it was empowering because women bought her products and they went to her training sessions. The seminars that I took when I was a teenager, she was offering those decades before I was born. And so I think the empowerment was. I don't know. I never really thought about that question that way. But I wonder if it wasn't maybe the most important thing that she sold. Women's empowerment. Whether you were a client or you worked for her, Effy.

Incredible. Well, you say in your book that she was unafraid of risks. What do you think that created that mindset of that steely determination which I suppose feeds into that whole story of.

Empowerment, passionate belief in herself and her product. Isn't that what every successful entrepreneur has, even today? I mean, yes, she knew that. She knew more about her company and her products than anyone else did. If you read my book, you'll see that Elizabeth Arden did not have terrific success with men, let's say not the same success she had with her business. So she tossed her husband out on the street, not because she found he was sleeping with one of her beautiful demonstrators, but because he undercut her in the business. He thought he could take it over, but he really questioned her on some ideas of hers, such as color matching, color harmony. That was an idea that revolutionized whole industries, not just her own. And her husband thought it was wrong and they shouldn't put money into it. So Elizabeth Arden was passionate about her products, passionate about what she was selling, passionate about what she could give to women. And I think that she knew that if she took a risk and failed, something would come to her. She did have failures. She did. Certainly she had to pick herself up and she had to abandon some, some products, some ideas. But I think at the bottom of that risk taking was she had an unshakable belief in herself and an unshakable belief in what she could bring to women and what she wanted to do.

And that's what makes for a successful business owner even today, I suppose.

I agree.

One thing that you talk about is how she was deeply committed. Purity. And how do you think that that emphasis that she had on purity, on trustworthiness, set her apart in, let's face it, an era where regulation was less stringent than it was today? I mean, we've seen some of the crazy claims they used to put out in adverts. So how did that really set her apart?

Elizabeth Arden was committed to product purity from the start of her business. She was lucky enough to hook up with a chemistry who shared her belief in product purity. And so the two of them worked closely together. He was a decades long employee of hers. I know this as a researcher because I went to Chicago to the American Medical association headquarters and that's where the archives are there. And the Bureau of Investigation was a relatively new subunit of the ama. If you were an editor or just a, you know, a person in Omaha, Nebraska, and you had a question about one of her products or really the Bureau of Investigation investigated everything from, you know, Crisco to cosmetics, right? Everything between you could write them and say, I would like you to investigate this product. Tell me about it. So someone wrote in once and said, what about this Elizabeth Arden velvet cream? Can you tell me what you think? So the chemists at the American Medical association reached out to the Arden Corporation Company and said, send us what you've got. So Arden said, right, I'm going to send you velvet cream ingredient list, anything you want, but I'm going to send you 15 other products as well, so you know where we stand. So along with the product list and so forth came a very serious note that said, and if you find anything wrong, we will fix it. So she got off on the right foot with the AMA investigators. But even if she hadn't said she wanted to fix it, what they found was nothing that was harmless. And so what I discovered as a researcher is that any letter that any query that came in after that, generally speaking, the AMA shot out a form letter which said, we have found Elizabeth Arden to be a high quality company and their products are harmless. That was the word they used, harmless. This was not the case with one of her competitors. Helena Rubenstein, for example, got herself in trouble routinely with the American Medical association and some other United States government agencies. But I think it's because Arden was an avid follower of beauty industry news. She was a member of several industry organizations and she paid attention to claims about, you know, women who were blinded by unsafe products and mascara and things like that. So I think she really wanted to avoid that. And that was a priority. Her whole, wow, I can't imagine the.

FDA doing that nowadays. If you write in and go, can you tell me about this company and them testing all the products out? So that in itself is incredible. And I know that this ties in also with her approach to holistic beauty. So she had a real holistic approach to skincare fitness. Well being. I was just reading the chapter in your book about how she brought exercise into her salons as well. How do you think her pioneering views on holistic beauty have, have influenced today's wellness movements?

Even I discovered throughout the course of the research for this book that this understanding of holistic beauty, which of course is a term we use today, she didn't use then, was very much a part of Elizabeth Arden. Her Arden look and makeup was based on skin care first. So for Arden, it was all about health. That meant physical health, it meant dietary health, it meant mental health, and it certainly meant the health of the skin. So she was the first beauty culturalist introduced an exercise department into her salons. And her definition of exercise was broad. It was everything from archery to horseback riding to swimming, all that kind of sporty stuff that was important but challenged in the 1920s because women weren't supposed to, you know, they weren't supposed to be competitive, and they weren't supposed to get themselves, you know, work. We weren't supposed to work up a sweat. That's the thing. Right. But Arden was behind that, and she clearly understood that when you move the body, the skin responds, and when you put good fuel in your body, the skin responds, and overall, you just feel mentally better. And she did care about mental health as well. So this, again, a lifelong commitment of ours to, again, what we would call holistic beauty. And I'm not an expert on holistic health care today. I'm not. But I do know that what happens in spas today, Elizabeth Arden did first, and she did it decades ago. So with very few exceptions, whatever you go to, whatever your spa, whether it's a day spa or, you know, we could couple spa. Elizabeth Arden did that first, including yoga. Yoga. Elizabeth Arden popularized yoga in the United States. It had a. Was kind of considered exotic at the time and a little suspicious because of that. But yoga, she swore, saved her from having surgery. And so she introduced it into all of her salons, including later her spas, and popularized it, although she didn't always call it yoga. But yoga became part of her exercise routine in the exercise department.

Wow, that is just incredible. I mean, what a pioneering approach to everything in her business, not just beauty then. And obviously, I mean, you were alluding to this at the beginning. She had a lengthy career, and she obviously kept going until the day she died. By the sands of things, how did she continue to stay relevant at that point? As the beauty industry has changed a lot over the last 120 years or so since she got going, I think.

That what helped Elizabeth Arden stay relevant was an optimism in the future of the world, really. She was not only passionately committed to her product and her ideas, but I think she really believed that things are always getting better. And I think that optimism then helps you to look ahead and not always stay wedded to the past. So two things here. She did stay wedded to the past in the sense that Arden was always criticized by the men who began to enter the industry because she had the biggest product line of anybody. And she really believed that if there was one woman in Detroit, Michigan, who loved one shade of lipstick that hardly anybody else bought, she would still manufacture and keep that on the shelf. So she did define customer loyalty as her being loyal to her customers, not the other way around. And that's the backwards looking. But I think the optimism and the relevance meant that she would try anything. She was enamored of new technology. She would give anything a go. Charles Revson really shook up the industry with his Fire and Ice ad because Elizabeth Arden and Helen Rubenstein and other women of that era fought their entire careers to keep sex out of the business. Right. We're not going to put sex in our advertising. We're not going to link sex with skincare, and we're sure as heck not going to link sex to makeup because that got us back to where we began with prostitutes. But when Charles Revson said, oh, no, you know, are you a fire or an ice girl or are you in this? Right. They had to really. And by the Sunny Ruben's thing too, they had to really rethink because Revson was a powerhouse competitor. So Arden said, right, well, we're moving on. I guess we're going to embrace sex in the sense that she could roll with the times, I guess you could say. I don't think she really changed her advertising to say it's all beginning a man. But I think her ads began to reflect kind of a more sensual. Her models became a little more sensual looking, a little less sort of pen and ink drawing technology. If I can just focus on this for a second. Elizabeth Arden was the first beauty culturalist to use radio. When radio. Radio in America, when it was introduced, was not used for sales. It was used for information. But it didn't take very long for folks to figure out that you could sell things on the radio. She was first out of the gate on that, and then she was first out of the gate on television as well. In 1939, before people even really had television sets, Arden was already looking into television. She flirted with the movies as well. Films were extremely popular. And she launched a makeup line for film use because it was so you couldn't use street everyday makeup in Hollywood. So she did that as well. And then, you know, she was not unhappy with people using her products in what she thought of as appropriate ways. One of the favorite things I learned about in was in the Art Institute of Chicago, they had a. They had hung an exhibit of floral paintings all over the place. And Elizabeth Arden somehow managed to hook up with this guy in Chicago who was in charge of the museum. And they wafted her perfumes throughout the exhibit, her floral perfumes, and called it Smell O vision. Right.

I love that.

Right. But she found ways to put her product everywhere, all over. So, you know, you could be relevant in the art museum, you could be relevant on television, you could be relevant in all sorts of places. And when the 60s came around, she didn't love the look of the 60s. She wasn't in love with the Twiggy look, for example, but she knew that it sold and she knew that her customers wanted it. And like a good capitalist, she made sure that they had it. And she always hired the best, most cutting edge hairstylist. She hired the first visiogiste in America. So she brought this man over, this makeup artist from Europe, and he became all the rage here in the States. You know, she was keeping up with the times again because she was an avid follower of the industry and unafraid to give her clients what they wanted. So the relevant, you know, she died in 1966, and I think probably that was a good year for her to die because she was never around for the backlash against cosmetics that came in the wake of the modern women's liberation movement. So that is not in the book because that is not an artist's life. But I think when she went out in 56, you know, makeup, everybody was wearing makeup. She had made makeup wearing acceptable for every woman everywhere. And by the 1960s, we are moving into that, you know, blue eyeshadow, green mascara era.

Exactly. I mean, what a profound impact to have on such a global level as well. If she was alive today, what do you think she would have made of modern technology?

Oh, she would have used it. She would have embraced it. She would have been all over social media. She would have used virtual reality. In fact, she did apply a kind of a very early version of some of these ideas that we find so fascinating today. She gave a makeup demonstration once in front of an enormous crowd, like a thousand women. Right. And nobody could see her. So next to her, she had this jumbo head, this huge head. And some artist was literally applying the colors on this huge head as she applied them on the woman in front of her. A kind of a really modern jumbotron. I don't know what you'd call it, but it was. You make do, right? So everybody's got to see what you're doing. This is before television or film or big screen. She used a mask, a kind of a mask that was made to the individual woman. And this was helpful for some of her product, both skin care and then makeup. She was also cutting edge about an early version of like today, you can upload your photo to, like, a makeup website, and you can try makeup, you can try hair styles. She had an early version of that as well. So throughout. Yeah, throughout the research, I kept being amazed at her advertising techniques and how I think, again, being unafraid of what was new, unafraid of trying things, unafraid of using the new in order to speak the interest of her clients and keep them coming back if it failed again, she put it. She sort of quietly put it away. But I think she really enjoyed seeing how she could utilize what was new and different out there. So whatever it was today, she would love it.

It sounds like she was wildly ahead of her time in some of the things she was doing. It's incredible. What an incredible story. And her story, I mean, you've already touched on Helena Rubinstein a couple of times as you've been talking. Her story is often brought closely together with that of Helena Rubenstein, another incredible entrepreneur. This supposed feud that everyone talks about, which has really defined their legacy to a certain degree. And you mention in your book that too much has been made of this relationship between the two of them. Why does the narrative continue to be about this supposed clash between those two incredible entrepreneurs?

Because every good story has a protagonist and an antagonist, because every story's got a good guy and a bad guy, and we're used to hearing about that. The short answer to your question is because it makes a good story. People love a good cat fight, right? And I think that's what it's been portrayed as. The story as it was written before. My biography is that Arden and Rubenstein never met. That's patently untrue. They worked together in the same industry. It was a small industry. They knew one another. The reality of their interchanges and their, you know, their evolving salons and product lists and advertising is a much richer and more nuanced story than they were. Simple. You know, whatever it was in the past. I think if you look at how their competition made them both better at what they did and spurred them both to innovate, you get story of two brilliant entrepreneurial capitalists instead of two cardboard cutouts. And I am not interested in reducing women to cardboard cutouts. I'm really not. Helen Rubenstein was a competitor of ours, and she absolutely was, but she was never the only competitor. They kept tabs on each other. Sure they did. And I'm 99% sure that when Arden went to Europe in the teens, she found herself in Helen Rubenstein's salon over there. And no doubt stole. I mean, borrowed with deep appreciation, some of the ideas of Rubenstein. The industry borrowed everything. They borrowed everything. Everybody borrowed from everyone else. It was a good idea. You know, you took it. The idea was to put your spin on it. This is what Arden was genius at. But Arden's clients went to Rubenstein. Rubenstein's clients went to Arden. They were both seeking the same elite, moneyed, you know, client base, but perfectly happy to sell to anyone who wanted, you know, their. Their product or their ideas. So I think the story keeps getting told as a kind of a just two people in the industry fighting because it makes a good story. But for me, as a woman's historian and a biographer of Arden, telling the full story is better, and it does justice to these two extraordinarily successful entrepreneurs.

Yes, well, I quite agree with you. And I do wonder if that same clash would have been written in the same way if this was about two men. Undoubtedly not, but that would be my personal viewpoint on that. So Elizabeth Arden didn't have children, she didn't have close family to carry on her legacy. What do you think she would have wanted her legacy to be? Be beyond the brand itself?

Yeah, that's a really good question. The brand, certainly. And the brand does continue. There are still Lizbeth Arden products you can buy that would make her very happy. I'm certain she would be very happy to see the continued influence on holistic health, because that really was the centerpiece of it. I think that the self care that we. That we emphasize today. She didn't call it that, but I think she'd be very happy to see women taking care of themselves, including their mental health, you know, all of it altogether. I think she would have been vindicated by the longevity of some of the ideas of hers. We still use cleanse, tone, nourish. That's still an important part of it. I think she would be truly jubilant about women having fun with their makeup today in a way that was just beginning to be apparent in the 1960s, where you could express yourself in fun ways, that could change. Right. Arden never believed you should always look the same every day. Every day, every day. She was a big fan of, you know, if you were going out to one occasion, you should change your look and so forth. And okay, yes, true, it did mean she sold more product. But I think women defining themselves by their look, I think she would be thrilled about that and totally happy about that as part of her legacy as well. So the Arden look maybe has. We have different names for it, maybe. And I think it's been superseded by kind of a self expression with makeup perhaps. Her skin care ideas, I think still stand the test of time. Her notions of holistic beauty, exercise, diet, health, all that, I think that stood the test of time. I think she'd be very proud of that. And, you know, we didn't talk about her spouse, but Elizabeth Arden invented the first destination luxury spa. It was called Main Chance. There was one in Maine, the state of Maine, here in the state, and she opened another one in Arizona. And those spas, she really meant them to be a place of rejuvenation and female support, like her salons were. And I think that if she could see the explosion in the spa industry today, she would be thrilled about that as well. Her spas don't exist anymore, but certainly others all around the globe have ever risen. I think the fact that we haven't gone backward, right, we haven't gone backwards to a time before 1910, but have just. There's a full flowering of women's ability to run businesses, to create businesses, to create their own makeup lines, to create their own skincare lines, and then to sell them with great, you know, happiness and sort of solidarity to other women. I think she'd be all over that.

Oh, I love this. She's had such a profound impact on the beauty industry and the world in general. And I'm not sure everyone knows this, but hopefully they will with your book as soon as they buy it. What did you enjoy writing the most about Elizabeth Arden's story?

I knew about her skincare lines. I knew about her makeup before I started, and I was interested as her biographer in figuring out when did these take off? Right. When did she become known as the global luxury brand and how did she do this? So that was a story I was looking for. There were two stories for me that surprised me and that still I find fascinating and which we haven't touched on yet at all. Elizabeth Arden was a workaholic. Oh, man. She didn't have friends for a very long time. Eventually she reaches a place in her business where she can indulge her childhood love of horses. So her avocation becomes thoroughbred horse racing. And she becomes known in the horse racing industry because she's got a lot of money. She can invest in it. It's kind of a. Kind of an oddball because she uses her skincare products on her horses, which she refers to as her babies. She puts the horses on her Christmas cards and she carries pictures of them in her wallet. Oh, my Goodness. She's a big believer in her eight Hour cream, that it helps to relax their muscles. So she trains her horse trainers how to do massage on her horses with her products. For example, she never used a whip on her horses. She was an early advocate of against animal cruelty. So she used her. Her status, I think, as an entrepreneur for this. So she, her horse won the Kentucky Derby in 1947. She was very good at this as well. But she also liked to put screens in her horse stalls and hang baskets of pink flowers outside. And there's a whole kind of other side of Elizabeth Arden in horses where she really. She loved all her horses. And, you know, she raced against the Queen horses. You know, she. She had a castle in Ireland she built. She raced in England and so forth. Anyway, so that was a lot of fun. There's some tragedy involved. She had some horses die in fires, and she fought some battles there. But the other thing that I found absolutely impressive is what she did during World War II. So Elizabeth Arden is a global entrepreneur. She saw World War II coming. She had survived World War I. She survived the Great Depression. But when World War II came around, she partnered with the United States military on behalf of women in uniform. It was a problem for many parents in America to see their daughter in uniform. That was crossing a gender line. That was tough for them. So Arden said, let me help you by assuring parents that their daughters can volunteer. Or you all had the Wrens. In England, we had the wax and the waves and the Spars. And so all of our military had female branches. So Arden said, let me match the makeup, for example, to the uniforms of the women Marines. So the chevron and the cord on their cap, she came up with a color called Montezuma Red, which matched beautifully. So now women Marines, when you look over a sea of women Marines, they're all in the same uniform, but they also had the same nail polish and matching rouge and lipstick. So there was a sort of uniformity in the military that looked good to the military that almost made mothers and fathers say, oh, okay, our daughters can maintain their femininity when they come out, they're still be able. They'll still be able to marry and have children. It was a different era. Right, but I know. But it was a help because it got women in, young women and freedmen up to fight, and that was the purpose of it. She also partnered with a women's fraternity sorority called Kappa Kappa Gamma and Kappa Gaba Gamma. And Elizabeth Arden built these women's service centers for enlisted women and officers. So wherever they had a. Where railroads came into town or, you know, where they could. They had time off or could rest. So big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit and New York, they created spaces where women could go to relax and refresh themselves. And every one of these included a makeup bar where women could take off their makeup, you know, do their skin routine, put on new makeup. And Elizabeth Arden paid for all this herself. She paid for all the makeup. She paid for the skincare. She kept every single one of these, more than a dozen of these makeup bars stocked. But she also helped them with celebrating. You know, they had. She funded dances and parties and so forth. She was a really strong, patriotic backer of the Allied fight in World War II. And I just found this very, very was. I said impressive. I thought it was admirable, the work she did. It all came out of her own, in her own pocket or her company's pocket. And so there's two different sides of Arden that don't get told a lot. Her horse racing, that she was called Mrs. Mudpack or Lady Lipstick because of the oddball thing she was doing. But the service in World War II and veterans were loyal to her. I mean, I interviewed women who still buy Elizabeth Arden products today because of what she did for women, and she hired veterans when the war was over purposely to support them. So I think these are, you know, different sides of art and that don't get talked about a lot. But that is your biographer. We're part and parcel of the, you know, the makeup, but also the fashion. And so all together. And a really, I think, fascinating package of a driven, ambitious, successful woman who was also a fully rounded individual.

Thank you so much for sharing those stories. I mean, that is absolutely fascinating. She was such a pioneer, such an inspiration. I feel like we could keep talking for hours and hours. And I so appreciate. I've really enjoyed talking to you already for so long. So unfortunately, we have to wrap it up. I think the final question to ask really is where can people buy your book? Because I sincerely recommend everyone listening goes out and does so immediately after finishing this podcast episode. But where can they buy it?

Thank you. Becoming Elizabeth Arden should really be available anywhere. You can get it from any online bookseller. You should be able to get it anywhere. Bricks and mortar store. If they don't have it, they can order it for you.

Amazing. Well, we'll include all the links in the show notes, so everyone listening, go and download the show notes now. And go and order your book, because it needs to be on your bookshelves. Stacy, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Really fascinating to learn more about Elizabeth Arden. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you. It's been my honor. Thanks so much.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this episode. How do you feel that the pioneers of the modern beauty industry can inspire you? What did you particularly enjoy learning about Elizabeth Arden's story? Leave us a comment on our social channels as both the Formula Botanica team and I love hearing from you. And if you want to hear more about some of the topics we cover today, please do delve back into the podcast archives. I love talking about beauty industry history, so I have some great other episodes for you which include episode 120 in which I interviewed Professor Geoff Jones of Harvard Business School who authored a book called Beauty Imagined. This is a fantastic book that details the origin of the whole modern beauty industry. Similarly, episode 130 is worth listening to as well, in which I set out my vision for the way that history teaches us that everyone can formulate. And honestly, I think Elizabeth Arden's story proves this as well. There's a wealth of information in our old episodes and I do encourage you to go back and listen to them. Thank you for joining Stacey and I for this latest episode of Green Beauty Conversations. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please do leave us a five star review so that other people can enjoy these conversations too. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or whatever your favorite podcast app is and stay tuned for the next episode. Follow Formula Botanicaormula Botanica on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter or LinkedIn and come and give me a follow Lorraine Dharmaier on Instagram and LinkedIn, visit our website@formulabotanica.com and sign up for our free online formulation course today.