Elizabeth Arden

Elizabeth Arden (born Florence Nightingale Graham; December 31, 1881 – October 18, 1966), also known as Elizabeth N. Graham, was a Canadian-American businesswoman who founded what is now Elizabeth Arden, Inc., and built a cosmetics empire in the United States. By 1929, she owned 150 salons in Europe and the United States. Her 1,000 products were being sold in 22 countries. She was the sole owner, and at the peak of her career, she was one of the wealthiest women in the world. Background She was born as Florence Nightingale Graham on her family's farm in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. The property is currently home to the Vaughan Grove community. Her parents had immigrated to Canada from Cornwall, United Kingdom, in the 1870s. Her father, William Graham, was Scottish and her mother, Susan (née Tadd), was Cornish and had arranged for a wealthy aunt in Cornwall to pay for her children's education. After dropping out of nursing school in Toronto, she joined her elder brother in Manhattan, working briefly as a bookkeeper for the E.R. Squibb pharmaceutical company. While there, Arden spent hours in their lab, learning about skincare. She then worked for Eleanor Adair, an early beauty culturist, as a "treatment girl". In her salons and through her marketing campaigns, Arden stressed teaching women how to apply makeup and pioneered such concepts as scientific formulation of cosmetics, beauty makeovers, and coordinating colors of eye, lip and facial makeup.