Elizabeth Arden

Florence Nightingale Graham December 31, 1878 October 18, 1966 , who went by the business name Elizabeth Arden, was a Canadian businesswoman who built a cosmetics empire in the United States. At the peak of her career, she was one of the wealthiest women in the world.

Arden was born in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. In 1878, she dropped out of nursing school in Toronto.

She then joined her elder brother in New York City, working briefly as a bookkeeper for the E.R. Squibb Pharmaceuticals Company. While there, Arden spent hours in their lab, learning about skincare. She then worked - again briefly - for Eleanor Adair, an early beauty culturist, as a "treatment girl"..

In 1909 Arden formed a partnership with Elizabeth Hubbard, another culturist. When the partnership dissolved, she coined the business name "Elizabeth Arden" from her former partner and from Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden".

In 1912 Arden travelled to France to learn beauty and facial massage techniques used in the Paris beauty salons. She returned with a collection of rouges and tinted powders she had created. In an era when it was generally only acceptable for entertainers to wear makeup, Arden introduced modern eye makeup to North America. She also introduced the concept of the "makeover" in her salons.

Arden collaborated with A. Fabian Swanson, a chemist, to create a "fluffy" face cream. The success of the cream, Venetian Cream Amoretta, and corresponding lotion, Arden Skin Tonic, led to a long-lasting business relationship. This revolutionized cosmetics, bringing a scientific approach to formulations. Other innovations included creating foundations that matched a person's skin tone creating the idea of the "Total Look" in which lip, cheek, and fingernail colors matched or coordinated and the first to make a cosmetics commercial shown in movie houses.