Click To View Larger Image

• by:
• Brandon, Ruth

A dual biography of the legendary founders of the cosmetics industry--Helena Rubinstein and L’Oréal’s Eugène Schueller--that is also a gripping and disturbing story of gender, power, and politics that stretches back to the evils of World War II and beyond.

Helena Rubinstein and Eugène Schueller started out in the beauty business within a few years of each other, and soon came to dominate it. But they could not have been more different. Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, claimed the world of paid work for women, and working women’s enthusiasm for her products made her the first female millionaire. Schueller, a Frenchman, and a conservative in the Henry Ford mould, thought woman belonged in the home, and used the beauty business as a source of cash to buy economic and political influence in the embryonic French fascist state during the war.

Schueller won, in the sense that his firm eventually swallowed Rubinstein’s. But victory cost him his reputation when in the wake of the takeover he was exposed as a Nazi collaborator. And his wartime activities had been abetted and condoned by a cadre of young men who, by the time the scandal broke, had scaled the peaks of wealth and power in postwar France. If they had collaborated, one had to wonder who had not?

Arguing that the battle between Schueller and Rubinstein continues on a metaphorical level to this day, cultural historian and biographer Ruth Brandon uses their conflict to ask important contemporary questions about feminism, standards of beauty, and the often murky intersection of individual political aims and the role of business. Drawn from incredible archival material and a vast historical record, Ugly Beauty is a riveting true story that reads like a thriller, filled with remarkable twists, turns, and larger-than-life characters.