NEW YORK -- Estee Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into an international cosmetics empire, has died. She was 97.
Lauder died late Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokeswoman.
In 1998, Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine's listing of the 20 most influential geniuses of business of the century. Her company placed No. 349 in the 2003 ranking in the Fortune 500 list of the nation's largest companies, with revenue at $4.744 billion.
In explaining her success, the cosmetics queen once said: ''I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.''
Lauder sold her products primarily through department stores -- Marshall Field's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, Neiman-Marcus, Harrods in London, Galeries Lafayette in Paris -- the tonier the better.
''Beauty is an attitude,'' she once said. ''There's no secret. Why are all brides beautiful? Because on their wedding day they care about how they look. There are no ugly women -- only women who don't care or who don't believe they're attractive.''
The company's product lines have included Estee Lauder, Clinique, Aramis, Prescriptives and Origins.
She also courted the rich and famous.
''I don't know her very well, but she keeps sending all these things,'' said Princess Grace of Monaco, who became a friend.
She enjoyed entertaining in her Upper East Side townhouse, her oceanfront home in Palm Beach, her London flat and her villa in the south of France.
But that was not how she grew up. Born Josephine Esther Mentzer in the working-class Corona section of Queens, she was the daughter of Max and Rose Schotz Mentzer. Lauder never disclosed her birth date, but a company spokeswoman said she was 97.
Lauder said her family always called her Esty (pronounced ES-tee). When a public school official spelled it Estee, it stuck.
In 1930, she married a garment center businessman named Joseph Lauter (later changed to Lauder), and they had their first son, Leonard, three years later.
During the 1930s, she began selling face creams that her uncle John Schotz, a chemist, mixed up in a makeshift laboratory. And she began experimenting with mixes.
Lauder went to beauty salons where she gave free demonstrations to women waiting under hair dryers. More often than not, they became customers. Sometimes she stopped women on Fifth Avenue to try her products. ''If you put the product into the customer's hands, it will speak for itself if it's something of quality,'' she declared.
In 1939, she got a divorce and moved to Florida. Years later, she explained why: ''I was married very young. You think you missed something out of life. But I found out that I had the sweetest husband in the world.''
She and Joseph remarried in 1942, had a second son, Ronald, and went into business together. Her persistence in selling paid off in 1948, when she persuaded a buyer at Saks to place a sizable order.
Estee Lauder became a household name in 1953, when the company debuted Youth Dew, a bath oil and perfume. Over the years she added new lines and new products, fragrances such as White Linen and Cinnabar, the Aramis line of men's toiletries and the Clinique line of fragrance-free, allergy-tested products.
As the privately held company grew, Lauder and her husband involved their sons in the decision making. Leonard Lauder took over as chief executive officer in 1982, the year before Joseph Lauder died, and nearly quadrupled annual sales by 1995.
Ronald Lauder left the business for several years in the '80s, serving defense and ambassador posts in the Reagan administration and making a failed bid for mayor of New York. He then returned to the company.
Lauder's public life dwindled after she broke her hip in 1994.
AP
