This absorbing and hilarious portrait of Helena Rubinstein (1872–1965) focuses on the years she spent in Australia as a young woman and is a ‘lost’ chapter in the grand narrative of the woman who created from scratch one of the first global cosmetics corporations. At its height it employed 30,000 women around the world.

Rubinstein, who will be the subject of a feature film by Studiocanal Australia, arrived in Australia from Poland when she was twenty-three years old. She lived in Australia for the next eleven years, working first as a governess, and then as a waitress, before opening her first salon. In later years, owing to the extraordinary degree of control she exercised over her glamorous image, many of the details of her early life in Australia were suppressed. The irony is that the vital origins that she managed to airbrush out of her own myth are the very ones that burnish it today. In this book we see her laying the foundations for her eventual global empire.