Estee Lauder, who died on Saturday aged 97, was the youngest of a triumvirite, with Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, of great American cosmetic queens, and was one of the world's most successful businesswomen.
She was greatly admired in the cosmetics industry for her marketing sense, her uncanny anticipation of trends in cosmetics and skin care, her risk-taking, and her ceaseless updating of attitude to both the content and sales of cosmetics. Yet hers was a hard earned reputation - and fortune.
In the course of more than 50 years in the beauty business, she was the founder of modern naturalistic cosmetics, the originator of the idea of "gift with purchase", and the inventor of both a men's skin care range and a hypo-allergenic range for everyday use. She was also the first to realise the commercial potential of launching a seasonal colour statement to co-ordinate with the international fashion collections.
Although she always refused to reveal the year of her birth, and most reference works and articles about her listed it as 1908, Estee Lauder was born on July 1 1906, in the New York borough of Queens. The youngest of six children of Max and Rose Mentzer, she was to have been called Esty, after a favourite Hungarian aunt, but due to various clerical errors the name that appeared on her birth certificate was Josephine Esther Mentzer.
The "Estee" came several years later when, according to her autobiography, a teacher decided to "add a little romantic French to the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian-Milanese name in her roll book".
Max Mentzer, though originally from a prosperous background in Hungary, had to support his family in America as a tailor before opening a hardware store. It was here that the young Estee acquired her first experience in selling. Her mother's passion for beauty regimes had an equally formative effect.
It was, however, the arrival in the Mentzer household shortly after the outbreak of the First World War of her mother's brother, John Shotz, that was to inspire Lauder in her future career. Shotz was a chemist who specialised in skin care preparations and from the makeshift laboratory he set up in the family stables he concocted everything from face-creams to make-up removers, which he then peddled round the neighbourhood.
"He captured my imagination and interest as no one else ever had," wrote Estee Lauder later; and it was her uncle who inspired her with the desire to train as a scientist.
Before she could pursue this path, however, in January 1930 she met and married Joseph H Lauter (shortly afterwards, the couple changed their name to its original Austrian, Lauder), a moderately successful businessman in the fashion trade.
Throughout the early years of her marriage and even after the birth of her elder son Leonard in 1933, Mrs Lauder continued to refine and improve her uncle's creams. "I cooked for my family and during every possible spare moment cooked up little pots of creams for faces."
Eventually, she was asked to run a beauty salon in New York's Upper East Side and over the next few years sold an increasing number of her products using a sales technique which included a free demonstration and sample.
The early years of her marriage were strained as Estee pursued her ambitions and in 1939 the couple were divorced. Four years later, however, they remarried and Joseph agreed to abandon his own ventures and make a go of the cosmetics business, taking charge of the finances of the company, while Estee remained responsible for marketing.
In these early days the only employees of Estee Lauder Inc were the Lauders themselves, and they had only four basic skin care products and a few make-up items, which they produced on their own on the gas burner of the converted restaurant on the Upper West Side which was their first factory.
It was at this point that Mrs Lauder developed the distinctive greenish blue packaging - chosen because it complemented virtually every bathroom colour scheme - which became the company's distinctive trademark.
For 15 years, the business remained relatively small and Estee Lauder, a very determined woman, travelled across the country almost half the year promoting her products. A consummate saleswoman, she would spend a week in every new store setting up displays, enthusiastically demonstrating her wares to customers, and training staff to meet her rigorous demands. By the early 1950s Lauder counters could be found in all the country's top department stores, from Saks 5th Avenue in New York to Neiman Marcus in Texas.
The Lauders were commercially innovative in many ways. From the first they had chosen to bypass the chemists' shops and to retail their products directly to the customer, first through beauty salons and later through department stores.
When their advertising budget proved too low to attract the major agencies, the Lauders again when straight to the customer, offering free samples through direct mail, charity giveaways and gifts with purchases. The last in particular was hugely successful and widely copied by their competitors.
The turning point for the company was the launch in 1953 of Youth Dew, a strongly scented bath oil which could also be worn as a scent. Priced as a bath oil - and initially given away as free samples - it was a product Estee Lauder cleverly understood would be something woman would feel comfortable buying for themselves.
It was an instant and enduring success; and it was Youth Dew which, according to anecdote, eventually helped her to gain a concession in Galeries Lafayette in Paris, where she spilt a sample of the fragrance on the floor. The pungent scent permeated the store, prompting dozens of customer to inquire about the product.
When her son Leonard joined the firm in 1958, after completing business school, he established a sales force, set up a research and development laboratory, expanded advertising and recruited professional managers at all levels, but Estee remained the driving force creatively.
In 1967, at her instigation, the company branched out into men's toiletries with Aramis and in 1968 they launched Clinique, the first line of fashion-oriented, allergy-tested cosmetics.
She, too, was responsible for the idea of the "Estee Lauder woman", of which the British actress Elizabeth Hurley was one of the latest faces in a long line of internationally recognised beauties used to publicise the brand.
In 1973, Leonard Lauder succeeded his mother as president and Estee assumed the title of chairman, and though she continued to work actively with the company she began to spend more time on her widespread social interests.
The company remained in family ownership until 1995 when it was floated on the New York stock exchange with an estimated value of three billion dollars. At this point, its products sold in more than 100 countries and took approximately 40 per cent of all the money spent on cosmetics in department stores. After the flotation, Mrs Lauder took the mainly honorary title of founding chairman.
A short pretty woman with blonde hair, hazel eyes and flawless skin, Estee Lauder was famous for her indefatigable energy, her forthright unsolicited advice, her self-deprecating humour and her pithy aphorisms - "With daughters-in-law keep your mouth shut and your pocket book open"; "Time is not on your side, but I am".
In her later years, she ended up on the Forbes Four Hundred list of the world's richest people and formed part of the very smart New York set which revolved around Le Cirque restaurant.
By then she had a multitude of houses - on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a vast Long Island estate, a villa in the South of France, a flat in London and two winter mansions in Palm Beach - where she would entertain in the grandest manner.
She became friendly with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and used to give an annual June anniversary party for them, complete on one occasion with a Viennese orchestra and on another with reproduction Faberge eggs.
Open-handed on a personal level - she was once asked by a multi-millionaress if she might borrow a spare powder compact, and handed over her own in solid gold and platinum, saying, "Either she buys a new one or I do, and we're neither of us going to cry all the way to the bank" - and she also gave generously to charity.
She helped to fund the restoration of Versailles, and endowed three children's playgrounds in Central Park.
Her husband Joseph died in 1983. She is survived by her two sons.
