Florence Nightingale Graham (December 31, 1884 October 18, 1966), who went by the

business name Elizabeth Arden, was a Canadian American businesswoman who founded
what is now Elizabeth Arden, Inc., and built a cosmetics empire in the United States. At the
peak of her career, she was one of the wealthiest women in the world.
Contents
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1 Biography
o 1.1 Career
2 References
3 Further reading
4 External links

Biography[edit]
Arden was born in 1884 in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. Her parents had emigrated to
Canada from Cornwall, United Kingdom in the 1870s. Her father, William Graham,
was Scottish and her mother, Susan, was Cornish and had arranged for a wealthy aunt in
Cornwall to pay for her children's education.[1] Arden dropped out of nursing school in
Toronto.[2]
She then joined her elder brother in Manhattan, working briefly as a bookkeeper for the E.R.
Squibb Pharmaceuticals Company. While there, Arden spent hours in their lab, learning
about skincare. She then workedagain brieflyfor Eleanor Adair, an early beauty culturist,
as a "treatment girl".
In her salons and through her marketing campaigns, Elizabeth Arden stressed teaching
women how to apply makeup, and pioneered such concepts as scientific formulation of
cosmetics, beauty makeovers, and coordinating colors of eye, lip, and facial makeup.
Elizabeth Arden was largely responsible for establishing makeup as proper and
appropriateeven necessaryfor a ladylike image, when before makeup had often been
associated with lower classes and such professions as prostitution. She targeted middle age
and plain women for whom beauty products promised a youthful, beautiful image. In politics,
Elizabeth Arden was a strong conservative who supported Republicans.[3]

Career[edit]
In 1909 Arden formed a partnership with Elizabeth Hubbard, another culturist. When the
partnership dissolved, she coined the business name "Elizabeth Arden" from her former
partner and from Tennyson's poem "Enoch Arden." With a $6,000 loan from her brother, she
then used the shop space to open her first salon on 5th Avenue.

In 1912 Arden travelled to France to learn beauty and facial massage techniques used in the
Paris beauty salons. She returned with a collection of rouges and tinted powders she had
created. She began expanding her international operations in 1915, and started opening
salons across the world. In 1934, she opened the Maine Chance residential spa in Rome,
Maine, the first destination beauty spa in the United States. It operated until 1970.[4]

The footstone of Elizabeth Arden

The grave of Elizabeth Arden inSleepy Hollow Cemetery

In recognition of her contribution to the cosmetics industry, she was awarded the Lgion
d'Honneur by the French government in 1962.
Arden died at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan in 1966; she was interred in the Sleepy
Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York, under the name Elizabeth N. Graham.