Helena Rubinstein : the Australian years

Biography of Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) which focuses on the years she spent in Australia as a young woman, who created one of the first global cosmetics corporations. At its height, Rubinstein's brand was synonymous with elegance and employed 30,000 women around the world. She arrived in Australia from Poland as a twenty-three years old and stayed for the next eleven years, working first as a governess and then as a waitress, before opening her first beauty salon in Melbourne. In later years, owing to the degree of control she exercised over her glamorous image, many details of her early life in Australia were suppressed. But the events she airbrushed out of her own myth reveal the surprising origins of her extraordinary rise.