Tech, social media, quick commerce are reimagining the beauty business

When Elizabeth Arden arrived in New York from Canada in 1907, her name was Florence Nightingale Graham. It was a decade before women got the vote, a time when to show so much as an ankle was horrifying, when less than 16 percent of America’s houses were wired for electricity, when a single woman might conceivably have a job, but definitely not a career, and on marriage was expected to retreat to her husband’s side and look after hearth and home.

An extract from War Paint (2003), a biography of Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, by Lindy Woodhead.

War Paint, as the book lets on at the outset, is the story of two women who were ‘indisputably, the originators of the global, luxury beauty industry as it exists today’. These were the first women to lend their names to the luxury brands they built. As Woodhead notes, they created the beauty regimes we take for granted today—lipstick in a ‘push-up metal container developed from cartridge shells after the First World War’, lip-gloss and lip-pencils, and much more.

Arden and Rubinstein gave women a freedom of expression ‘analogous to women gaining the right to vote’. Perhaps most important, more than the ‘promised beauty’ of the products, Woodhead reckons was their underlying philosophy: That women deserve time for themselves; that women who spend time on a beauty regime are not being ‘self-indulgent or vain’.

Why do these women ring a bell more than a century later in another neck of the global woods in a rapidly changing digital and social media age? The answer may well lie in this Forbes India special issue on beauty—which is not only as much about eyeliners, mascara and dabs of rouge as it is about the levelling of the playing field. A rash of direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands along with tech-driven recommendations—think personalisation, courtesy of artificial intelligence—are finding their way not just into the snobby salons of South Mumbai and South Delhi, but also the dusty markets of smaller towns and cities.