War Paint: Madame Helena Rubinstein and Miss Elizabeth Arden: Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry [Hardcover]

"...is exhaustingly, admirably researched..." (The New York Times - Book Review section, Februsry 15, 2004)

"The amount of research and meticulous personal data in [your] book is really quite remarkable and compelling. It provides a wealth of information from which to draw wonderfully three-dimensional characters and humanizes this iconic twosome."–Raquel Welch

"I have seldom enjoyed a book so much as WAR PAINT. The research is staggering - I loved all the detail about society and the arts in Paris, New York and London that so beautifully set our two heroines in context during such a long span of years - well done - it was a wonderful read. Thank you for so much enjoyment."–Lulu Guinness

A fascinating dual biography of the women who founded today’s beauty industry

They were both born in the nineteenth century in humble circumstances–Helena Rubinstein in an orthodox Jewish household in Kraków, Poland, Elizabeth Arden on a farm outside Toronto. But by the 1930s, they were bitter rivals in New York, the rulers of dueling international beauty empires that would forever change the way women thought about cosmetics, salons, and wrinkles. This riveting biography brings these two celebrated women to life, revealing the ruthless drive and innovative business strategies that took each to the top. Along the way, it offers an intriguing look at their personal idiosyncrasies (Rubinstein collected art, Arden racehorses), their checkered marriages, and the rarefied social milieu in which they both traveled.

Bold, brilliant, and utterly ruthless, Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden spawned the modern beauty industry and forever changed the way women think about cosmetics, salons, and wrinkles. Along the way, they rubbed elbows with many of the greats in the worlds of the arts and fashion and helped launch several brilliant careers. Yet, other than official press releases and autobiographical accounts that tend to be more fluff than fact, little has been written about the two. Now, nearly forty years after their deaths, War Paint goes behind the gloss and glamour to tell the riveting true story of these remarkable women and their epic achievements–and no less epic rivalry.

In the late nineteenth century, good girls didn’t want careers–and they certainly didn’t paint their faces. Business, like politics and every other field of serious endeavor, was considered inherently unsuited for a member of the fair sex. In War Paint, Lindy Woodhead reveals how two unlikely young women, Chaja Rubinstein and Florence Nightingale Graham, both born into poverty–one in the Krakow Ghetto, the other in rural Canada–and lacking any formal education, defied nineteenth-century notions of class and gender and went on to become two of the twentieth century’s most powerful business tycoons.

A story of unquenchable ambition and unbendable wills, of bitchy turf wars and grand obsessions, and, above all, of true business genius, War Paint reveals how "Madame" and "Miss Arden" (or "that woman!" and "the other one," as each was known to the other, respectively) transformed the piddling toiletries trade of the 1890s into today’s insatiable, multibillion-dollar market for dreams in creams–and how, in the process, they pioneered modern advertising, product packaging, consumer public relations, and direct marketing.

From the Montparnasse of Hemingway and Picasso and the Greenwich Village of E. E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes to the ballrooms and boardrooms of New York, Paris, and London, War Paint weaves a vivid tapestry of intersecting lives and warring ambitions in the early decades of the twentieth century.

An engrossing dual biography set against the grand sweep of two world wars and the birth of the modern consumer culture, War Paint is at once a master stroke of scholarship and a good, old-fashioned, juicy tell-all about the supremely talented, deeply flawed doyennes of the modern culture of beauty.

Raves for War Paint

"The amount of research and meticulous personal data in this book is really quite remarkable and compelling. It provides a wealth of information from which to draw wonderfully three-dimensional characters and humanizes this iconic twosome."
—Raquel Welch

"I have seldom enjoyed a book so much as War Paint. The research is staggering–I loved all the detail about society and the arts in Paris, New York, and London that so beautifully set our two heroines in context during such a long span of years . . . it was a wonderful read."
—Lulu Guinness

"A compelling cosmetic portrait of the first half of the twentieth century."
—W magazine

"So riveting that it reads like the movie that will surely be made. . . . With first-hand research and fast-paced prose, Woodhead has succeeded in turning dusty archives into high drama."
—Suzy Menkes, International Herald Tribune

"It might seem impossible to wring another drop of H2O (water is still a 90 percent base of most cosmetics), let alone humour and historical interest, out of the absurd but ever-alluring beauty business, but Lindy Woodhead has succeeded."
—Nicky Haslam, Literary Review

"These were women who were tough in business, who had a single vision–an idea of what they believed in and would do anything to get there."
—Bobbi Brown

LINDY WOODHEAD has been in international fashion public relations for more than twenty-five years. She worked in journalism, music, and film publicity before establishing her own agency in 1974. Woodhead retired from fashion to write four years ago. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she lives in London and the southwest of France.