I went to an ADFAS lecture today and its title was the POWDER and the GLORY! Well that was a great little play on words and the lecture was an insight into this cosmetic empire started by a young Jewish Pole called Helena Rubinstein.

What I didn’t know is that she was the eldest of 8 girls and in 1896 she decided to come to Australia, with very little money and hardly any English. She had an uncle in Coleraine in Western Victoria. She had a great complexion and was soon producing beauty creams for the other local women using lanolin (with all those sheep around it was a handy product to use) and she experimented with adding lavender, pine bark and water lilies to her cream to make it smell less sheepy.

Australia is where she launched her beauty salons, promising all kinds of restorative treatments and of course from there she took over the world. Just wondering what little empire I can create with sweet smelling lavender which is growing in my back garden.