It’s a message we learn in childhood, but all too quickly forget: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” “Beauty is only skin deep.” With its incandescent paintings and imaginative text, Ms. Rubinstein’s Beauty shows us just how true these timeless sayings can be. Children will be enchanted…and surprised at every turn. “Ms. Rubenstein is a beautiful woman. But nobody knows it.” No—they don’t notice her wonderful eyes, delicate hands, graceful feet, and kind heart. Something a little strange, a little distracting about her captures their attention instead. But one man—himself a bit out of the ordinary—thinks she’s the vision of loveliness. Pep Montserrat has created a gorgeous tribute to love that looks beyond the obvious—and a picture book as special as its two main characters.
Thanks to a combination of business savvy, breathtaking chutzpah, and lucky timing, Helena Rubinstein managed to transform herself from a poor Polish emigrant to the world's first self-made female tycoon. She went from selling homemade "Crème Valaze" out of her house in Australia to becoming an international cosmetics magnate. Tiny and plump, wearing extravagant jewels and spiked heels, she was a fixture of upper-crust New York for many years. She was larger than life, and never took no for an answer: when she was refused from a New York City apartment on the grounds that she was Jewish, she went ahead and bought the whole building and promptly moved in. The story of Eugène Schueller and L'Oréal begins in 1907, in a dingy working-class part of Paris, where a young Schueller sat at his family's kitchen table trying to develop the first harmless artificial hair dye. The tale of how L'Oréal went from that point to the world's largest cosmetics company is fascinating and full of intrigue, with a little of everything: fascist assassins, bitter unmaskings, political scandals. In 1988, although Schueller and Rubinstein had long since passed away, their worlds collided when L'Oréal bought Rubinstein's company — leading to a series of scandals that threw a new and sinister light on L'Oréal. For starters, Rubinstein was Jewish, but Schueller and many other top L'Oréal executives had been active Nazi collaborators. What came to light threatened the reputations of some of France's most powerful men - up to and including its president. This is a powerful, dramatic, and largely untold story about the ugly truth behind a beauty empire.
Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden's remarkable rivalry was ruthless, relentless and legendary--pushing both women to build international beauty empires in a world dominated by men.
Set against the glamorous skylines of 1950s Manhattan, world-leading cosmetics entrepreneur Helena Rubinstein is locked in a power struggle with rivals Elizabeth Arden and Revlon. From humble beginnings as a Polish-Jewish immigrant, this is the story behind one of the best-known faces in the world of beauty. But as her professional and family conflicts reach fever pitch, will the ghosts of a turbulent past topple one of the world's richest businesswomen? Madame Rubinstein is a bright new comedy where the nails are painted and the gloves are off. Yet when the lipstick bleeds and the makeup fades, what is there left to hide behind? Written by esteemed Australian playwright John Misto, this edition of the text was published to coincide with its 2017 run at the Park Theatre, London.
War Paint is the story of two extraordinary women, Miss Elizabeth Arden and Madame Helena Rubinstein, and the legacy they left: a story of feminine vanity and marketing genius. Behind the gloss and glamour lay obsession with business and rivalry with each other. Despite working for over six decades in the same business, these two geniuses never met face to face - until now. 'The definitive biography of women and their relationships to their faces in the twentieth century' Linda Grant, Guardian 'I have seldom enjoyed a book so much . . . the research is staggering . . . a wonderful read' Lulu Guinness
An award-winning journalist’s dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last evening of summer in 2013, five shots rang out in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings there weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock. Terrance Roberts was a revered anti-gang activist. His attempts to bring peace to his community had won the accolades of both his neighbors and the state’s most important power brokers. Why had he just fired a gun? In The Holly, the award-winning Denver-based journalist Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events that left a local gang member paralyzed and Roberts facing the possibility of life in prison. Much more than a crime story, The Holly is a multigenerational saga of race and politics that runs from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter. With a cast that includes billionaires, elected officials, cops, developers, and street kids, the book explores the porous boundaries between a city’s elites and its most disadvantaged citizens. It also probes the fraught relationships between police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex–gang members as they struggle to put their pasts behind them. In The Holly, we see how well-intentioned efforts to curb violence and improve neighborhoods can go badly awry, and we track the interactions of law enforcement with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders of a neighborhood. When Roberts goes on trial, the city’s fault lines are fully exposed. In a time of national reckoning over race, policing, and the uses and abuses of power, Rubinstein offers a dramatic and humane illumination of what’s at stake.
This book has been published in conjunction with the exhibition "Helena Rubinstein: Beauty is power," organized by the Jewish Museum, New York, October 31, 2014 - March 22, 2015.
"I had the good fortune to grow up in a wonderful area of Jerusalem, surrounded by a diverse range of people: Rabbi Meizel, the communist Sala Marcel, my widowed Aunt Hannah, and the intellectual Yaacovson. As far as I'm concerned, the opinion of such people is just as authoritative for making social and economic decisions as the opinion of an expert using a model." Part memoir, part crash-course in economic theory, this deeply engaging book by one of the world's foremost economists looks at economic ideas through a personal lens. Together with an introduction to some of the central concepts in modern economic thought, Ariel Rubinstein offers some powerful and entertaining reflections on his childhood, family and career. In doing so, he challenges many of the central tenets of game theory, and sheds light on the role economics can play in society at large. Economic Fables is as thought-provoking for seasoned economists as it is enlightening for newcomers to the field.
This lavishly illustrated volume opens a window into the world of one of the most extravagant and wide-ranging style-makers of the last century, a pioneer of the cosmetics industry who was also celebrated for the daring and prescience of her art collecting, her decorating, and her personal couture. Four hundred vintage images and a meticulously researched text, including 16 essays by renowned experts in the fields of art and interior design, illuminate and trace the public and private lives of Helena Rubinstein. Rubinstein's bold and influential flair for decor - sleekly modern at times, and at other times a wildly eclectic sampling from different eras - was showcased globally in her beauty salons and in her glamorous residences in New York, Paris, and the South of France. An astute patron, she invested in artworks by the luminaries of Parisian bohemia just as they began their ascent. Her vast collection included tapestries by Picasso and Rouault, paintings by Dégas, Dufy, Matisse, Miró, Modigliani, and Monet, as well as murals by Dalí. Her striking instinct for fashion (she wore Worth and Poiret at first, and Balenciaga and St. Laurent 60 years later) and her famous overscaled jewelry kept her in the public eye, decade after decade. Rubinstein's vibrant character, reflected in her personal style and in the interiors of her homes and salons, is captured here in works by photographers such as Cecil Beaton, Brassaï, André Kertész, Dora Maar, and Man Ray - many of which have never before been published. When the flamboyant and decisive Helena Rubinstein died in 1965, at the age of 94, her huge collections were dispersed. But in these pages her world comes alive again: Over the Top is a unique record of the passionate life and style of this self-made mogul and the century she helped define.
