Fantastic Builders and Where to Find Them, 3rd installment

“Every day I touched 50 faces” (Estée Lauder)

Builder spotlight #4: “Every day I touched fifty faces” (Estée Lauder, 1908-2004)

Estée Lauder, 1966. New York World-Telegram and the Sun staff photographer: Sauro, Bill, photographer. - Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c09674

Principles on display: Your life as the yardstick; finding person-life fit; building yourself by building; build YOUR perfect life

Keeping with the theme of Amazing Esthers, today I want to spotlight the iconic Estée Lauder (born “Josephine Esther Mentzer” to Hungarian Jewish immigrants in Queens; she later added the accent over the “e” to lend elegance and sophistication to her brand). 

Listening to David Senra’s recent Founders Podcast episode on Estée’s 1985 autobiography, A Success Story, I noticed a funny parallel to Loyal founder Celine Halioua (the first builder to be spotlighted in this series). Just as Celine reflected that she would not have been able to sustain motivation for her canine-focused biotech startup had she not herself been a dog lover, so Estée reflects in the book (this and all excerpts below as quoted by David, and all emphases added by me): 

I sometimes wonder if I had set my heart on selling tassels, cars, furniture, or anything else but beauty, would I have risen to the top of a profession? Somehow I doubt it. I believed in my product. I loved my product… A person has to love her harvest if she's to expect others to love it. And beauty was such a bountiful harvest.

But unlike Celine, who views the mission of extending dogs’ lifespans as a stepping stone—albeit an important and largely rewarding-in-itself stepping stone—toward her ultimate mission of advancing human longevity, Estée had no further endgame: a life devoted to evangelizing beauty, as she saw and understood it, was the endgame. At a time when women were generally expected to be homemakers, Estée was “a woman with a mission. I had to show as many women as I could reach not only how to be beautiful, but how to stay beautiful.”

This was, for Estée, nothing short of a holy quest.

Here are just a few excerpts that paint a picture of how and why she chose this quest, and what it meant to her:

Beauty is a fine invention, if the truth be known. The skilled woman can invent beauty over and over again with extraordinary effect. The art of inventing beauty transcends class, intellect, age, profession, geography— virtually every cultural and economic barrier. There isn’t a culture in the world that hasn’t powdered, perfumed, and prettied its most adored and fabled women, its most respected women. Love has been planted, wars won, and empires built on beauty. I should know. I’m an authority on all three. Love, wars, and empires have been woven into my personal tapestry for decades. I’ve been selling Beauty ever since I could recognize Her.

And on a more intimately personal level:

[B]eauty is the best incentive to self-respect. You may have great inner resources, but they don't show up as confidence when you don't feel pretty…. The pursuit of beauty is honorable.

She traces this love of beauty back to her earliest memories:

My very first memory is of my mother's scent, her aura of freshness, the perfume of her presence. My first sensation of joy was being allowed to reach up and touch her fragrant and satiny skin. Her hair didn't escape my attention, either. As soon as I was old enough to hold a brush, l'd give her no peace.

As a young girl “mesmerized by pretty things and pretty people,” Estée would experiment with painting and touching up the faces of anyone who’d allow it:

Even at eight, being fashionable, being feminine, being different, was a reason for me…

All of this annoyed my father considerably. ‘Stop fiddling with other people's faces,’ he'd say.

But that is what I liked to do—touch other people's faces, no matter who they were, touch them and make them pretty. Before I'm finished, I'll set, I'm certain, the world's record for face touching.

At that time Estée passively dreamt of becoming an actress someday, but had no conception of turning her love of beauty into a business career (if she was to have a career at all; recall that most women in her day did not). Then came a pivotal encounter with her uncle, John Schotz, who turned her flicker of youthful interest into a lifelong flame:

My shining moment came in the form of a quiet, bespectacled man who also loved touching faces.

Uncle John Schotz, my mother's brother came to visit us from Hungary. He was a skin specialist. What glories those words conjured up!

Estée’s story of apprenticing herself to her Uncle John is instructive for any of us wishing to light a spark within the young people in our lives:

He captured my imagination and interest as no one else ever had. I was together with Uncle John. He understood me. What's more, he produced miracles. I recognized in my Uncle John my true path. He produced his glorious cream in our home, working happily over a gas stove. I watched and learned, hypnotized.

This is the story of witching. I was irrevocably bewitched by the power to create beauty. Uncle John had worlds to teach me.

We constructed a laboratory of sorts in the tiny stable behind the house. My parents installed gleaming linoleum on the floors and walls. We set up a table, where I watched my uncle mix his magic.

Do you know what it means for a young girl to suddenly have someone take her dreams quite seriously? Teach her secrets? I could think of nothing else. After school, I'd run home to practice being a scientist. I began to value myself so much more, trust my instincts, trust my uniqueness. Trusting oneself does not always come naturally. If learned when young, the practice sticks. Today, there is no one who can intimidate me because of title or skill or fame. I do what's right for me.

Thus Estée came to see that her most personally valued activity—creating beauty—need not get relegated to a mere frivolous pastime, but could constitute serious, credible work. She saw that she could build real knowledge and provide real value to people in the process:

I didn't have a single friend who wasn't slathered in our creams. If someone had a slight redness just under her nose that was sure to emerge into a sensitive blemish the next day, she'd come to visit, I'd treat her to a Creme Pack—voilà!—vastly improved skin the next day. …Friends of friends of friends appeared…. My reputation among my peers at Newtown High School grew by leaps and bounds.

And, even more fundamentally, she came to see that what she values is real and important in its own right; that her dreams deserve to be taken seriously.

Deep inside, I knew I had found something that mattered much more than popularity. My moment had come and I was not about to miss seizing it. Uncle John loved me, I loved him, and my future was being written in a jar of snow cream.

This newfound conviction never departed her. Even as a 25-year-old wife and mother struggling to make ends meet, she continued to run her beauty experiments in earnest:

Times were lean. About two years after our marriage, we had a beautiful son, and I spent my days mothering Leonard. And all the time, all the time, I was also mothering my zeal for experimenting with my uncle's creams, improving on them, adding to them. I was forever experimenting on myself and on anyone else who came within range.

Good was not good enough—I could always make it better. I know now that ‘obsession’ is the word for my zeal. I was obsessed with clear glowing skin, shining eyes, beautiful mouths.

It was never quiet in the house. There was always a great audible sense of industry, especially in the kitchen, where I cooked for my family and during every possible spare moment, cooked up little pots of cream for faces. I always felt most alive when I was dabbling in the practice cream.

I felt as though I was conducting a secret, absorbing experiment—a real adventure.

Even when she wasn’t cooking up her beauty creams, Estée was hardly playing the dutiful housewife: instead, she was chasing after every conceivable opportunity to demo and sell those creams. The way she describes the product presentations she gave in beauty salons, at hotels, in women’s homes over a game of bridge, reads uncannily like a love affair:

The mood at these sessions was as exhilarating for me as for them.

I didn't need bread to eat, but I worked as though I did… from pure love of the venture. For me, teaching about beauty was and is an emotional experience. I brought them charisma and knowledge about their possibilities. They gave me a sense of success. I felt flushed with excitement after each session… Business itself was the purest romance for me.

Elsewhere Estée again analogizes her experience of building the business to a passionate romance:

Business is not something to be lightly tried on, flippantly modeled. It's not a distraction, not an affair, not a momentary fling.

Business marries you. You sleep with it, eat with it, think about it much of your time. It is, in a very real sense, an act of love. If it isn't an act of love, it's merely work, not business.

As you might expect from these descriptions, Estée’s devotion to her beauty business put a strain on her actual romance; after 9 years of marriage, she and her husband Joseph got a divorce. As Estée explains in the book, she was “married very young,” and she thought she might have “missed something out of life.”

What you might not expect, however, is that their story did not end there: four years later, Estée, having realized she had “the sweetest husband in the world,” re-married Joseph—and this time she made him an equal partner in her business. A year later their second son was born, and both of their sons got involved in the business as well. Leonard, who eventually became CEO and helped grow the company into the global cosmetics empire it is today, recalled affectionately in a 2020 CBS interview how he forged his own identity and self-confidence through his early days helping out with the business: “We had a little tiny factory, and I would go there after school for 25 cents an hour and I'd work.” As he reflects in his own memoir, excerpted here, “The company and I grew up together, our lives as closely paired as twins. It has always been more than a family company: it was—and continues to be—my family.”

So it turned out that Estée didn’t have to choose between her love of beauty and her love of Joseph and her sons. Instead she could fuse her loves together, uniting her whole family around a shared mission worthy of animating all of their beautiful, fully-lived lives. 

There is much more to learn from the story of how Estée built her empire, most of which I’m omitting here; go listen to David’s recent episode (as well as the earlier episode he devoted to the same book 3 years ago), or buy the book (warning: it’s pricey!) if you want to go straight to the source.

Catch up on prior installments:

Introduction to the series

Builder spotlight #1: “Must Love Dogs” (Celine Halioua)

Builder spotlight #2: “Mr. Lazy” (David Allen)

Builder spotlight #3: The Right Kind of “Crazy” (Esther Crawford)