Estée Lauder (businesswoman)

Estée Lauder ( EST-ay LAW-dər; born Josephine Esther Mentzer; July 1, 1908 – April 24, 2004) was an American businesswoman. She co-founded her eponymous cosmetics company with her husband, Joseph Lauter (later Lauder). Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine's 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century.

Early life and education

Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, New York City, the second child born to Rose Schotz, born in Sátoraljaújhely, Hungary, and Max Mentzer, born in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia). Her parents were Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her maternal grandmother was from Sátoraljaújhely and her maternal grandfather was from Gelle (now Holice, Slovakia), while her father had Czech-Jewish ancestry. Lauder's claims of descent from European aristocracy were discredited in a biography, Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic (1985) by Lee Israel. Her New York Times obituary observed "she was a New Yorker and not an aristocrat at all", notwithstanding "the mythmaking that is so much of the magic of the beauty industry". Her "favourite story was that she had been brought up by her Viennese mother in fashionable Flushing, Long Island, in a sumptuous home with stables, a chauffeured car and an Italian nurse."

In actuality, in 1898 her mother Rose had emigrated from Hungary to the United States with her five children at the time to join her first husband, Abraham Rosenthal. In 1905, Rose married Max Mentzer, a shopkeeper who had also immigrated to the United States in the 1890s.