Elizabeth Arden: 100 Years of Beauty & Glamour

We’ve been very remiss on this blog for not yet mentioning that our favorite beauty house, Elizabeth Arden, is celebrating its 100th birthday in 2010. Miss Arden, born 1878-ish near Toronto, Canada, opened her first salon, on Fifth Avenue in New York, in 1910. By the early ‘30s she had salons around the world. Her income was reported to be in excess of 700,000 in 1931 (almost $10 million today). During the Depression, the flagship New York salon expanded to seven floors. It is said to have been the model for the salon in The Women. “Looking like she just stepped out of an Elizabeth Arden salon” became synonymous with soignée in the ‘30s.

On June 21, 1933, Elizabeth Arden opened her Los Angeles Salon, at 3933 Wilshire Blvd. The semi-circular building, with its black and white marble façade and signature Chinese red lacquered door, was modeled after her Fifth Avenue salon on the exterior. The interior, however, had been designed by the great MGM stylist Adrian. Under Adrian’s direction, the circular main salon had walls of jade gray, with silvery gray curtains, black and white floor (with a “symbolic star” in black), silver-gray satin corduroy covered chairs, colonial-empire style sofas, and crystal chandeliers. The third floor contained the exercise rooms as well as the “Garden of Arden,” which Adrian designed, through copious plants, vines and painted metal awnings, to look like an outdoor room. Miss Arden greeted her new customers personally on opening day.

For further reading:

A brief history on this Radcliffe website.

And another excellent, accurate history post on the Ann Lauren blog

In 2009, public television aired a documentary about Miss Arden and her arch-rival Helena Rubinstein, titled The Powder & the Glory. View & more information here. It is also on DVD.

The film is based on the book War Paint: Miss Elizabeth Arden and Madame Helena Rubinstein — Their Lives, Their Times, Their Rivalry by Lindy Woodhead. An excellent book that we highly recommend – our only criticism is that it seems fairly obvious that the author does not like Miss Arden; author bias in a history is not so good.

The self-styled Elizabeth Arden (formerly Florence Nightingale Graham) strikes a romantic pose in this 1930 ad from the Fabulous Duke University ad* Access collection. The name Arden came from the Tennyson poem Enoch Arden and Elizabeth because she had always liked the name. As she once famously said: "There is only one other Elizabeth like me, and she is the Queen."

French model Cecille Bayliss was the “face” of the “Elizabeth Arden Look” in advertising from 1920 to 1940. Miss Arden's signature color? Pink.

Elizabeth Arden was one of the first beauty houses, if not the first, to offer travel size containers of her beauty products, assuring that her ladies would be gorgeous whether they were up the Amazon or on a mountain top. For the 100th Anniversary, Elizabeth Arden introduced this “vintage style train case” (below). There is also a 100th Anniversary limited edition signature lipstick, Red Door Red.

Top image: Elizabeth Arden’s Los Angeles salon, from the Los Angeles Public Library digital photograph collection.