The artists, entrepreneurs, queens and chemists who changed how the world looks at itself.
25 profiles, filed by subject, era and culture
Every profile is filed on one or more shelves. Choose any to narrow the collection, and the lives it holds light up below.
3500 BCE – 500 CE
2 lives
500 – 1500
2 lives
1400 – 1700
3 lives
1837 – 1901
5 lives
1920 – 1929
4 lives
1930 – Today
9 lives
Where to beginFrom the queens of Egypt to the founders of today
All 25 profiles
Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi completed a thirty-book medical encyclopaedia around the year 1000, and one of its books treats cosmetics as medicine. He is now widely credited with inventing lipstick, a claim built on a modern reading of one passage about moulded perfumes.
Arinobu Fukuhara opened a Western-style pharmacy in Tokyo's Ginza district in 1872 and named it Shiseido. Its cosmetics were sold on a pharmacist's authority at the moment Japan was deciding what a safe cosmetic was, and in 1916 they became a business of their own.
Cleopatra VII is the most-described and least-documented face in cosmetic history. What survives is Egyptian material evidence of the wrong centuries, Roman polemic, and a treatise wrongly attributed to her generations after she died.
Diane de Poitiers was famous for a complexion that seemed not to age. The courtier Brantôme wrote that she wore no paint, and that she was said to take drinkable gold every morning. When remains identified as hers were analysed, the gold was there.
Estée Lauder and her husband Joseph launched their company in 1946 and won a first order from Saks Fifth Avenue a year later. The company credits her with making the free sample a standard practice. The story of where she and her creams came from has been told in two competing versions.
Sarah Rachel Leverson, trading as Madame Rachel, ran an enamelling business at 47a New Bond Street and sold some sixty preparations as the beauty secrets of ancient Arabia. She was prosecuted for fraud in 1868 and 1878 and died in prison in 1880.
Maksymilian Faktorowicz built cosmetics for film stock rather than for mirrors. Supreme Greasepaint, colour harmony and Pan-Cake moved studio technique into ordinary bathrooms within a generation.
Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji at the Heian court in the early eleventh century. Its scenes of unblackened teeth, stained brows and a reddened nose are some of the most quoted evidence for Heian make-up, and they are fiction written by an insider for readers who would notice a mistake.
The painted bust of Nefertiti has stood for an ancient beauty ideal since it was dug out of a sculptor's workshop at Amarna in 1912. A CT study published in 2009 found that its smooth face is a thin skin of plaster over a limestone face that is not quite the same.
Nur Jahan was the most powerful woman of the Mughal court, and popular history credits her with discovering attar of roses. Her husband Jahangir recorded the discovery in his memoirs and gave the credit, and a string of pearls, to her mother.
Sharon Chuter, the Nigerian-born founder of UOMA Beauty, started #PullUpOrShutUp on 3 June 2020, asking brands that had posted support for Black Lives Matter to publish within seventy-two hours how many Black people they employed. She died in August 2025, aged thirty-eight.
Elizabeth I has the most famous painted face in English history, and the evidence that she painted it is thinner than its fame. A German traveller who saw her in 1598 recorded wrinkles, black teeth and red false hair, and said nothing about paint.
The Empress Dowager Cixi was the most powerful figure at the late Qing court and managed her image with unusual care. The fullest description of her daily make-up comes from Der Ling, who served at her court for two years and published a memoir in 1911: a vivid witness who also invented parts of her own story.
Harriet Hubbard Ayer founded a cosmetics company in New York in 1886 around a cream said to have been made for Madame Récamier. She lost it after a fight with her backer, spent more than a year in an asylum, and reinvented herself as a beauty columnist.
Sarah Breedlove built a national hair-care company by training thousands of agents to sell a scalp regimen to Black women. She called herself a hair culturist and objected when the press called her otherwise.
Annie Turnbo Malone developed hair preparations for Black women around 1900, moved her business to St Louis in 1902 and opened Poro College there in 1918, a school, business headquarters and community centre in one building. She is usually mentioned as the woman Madam C. J. Walker once worked for, which is the least interesting fact about her.
Chaja Rubinstein opened a skin-centred salon in Melbourne in 1902 and turned a Paris classification of skin types into a repeatable global sales method delivered in a laboratory coat.
Florence Nightingale Graham built a treatment salon on Fifth Avenue and coupled skincare to colour. The tale of her handing lipstick to suffragists in 1912 does not survive contact with the record.
Charles Revson co-founded Revlon in 1932 on an opaque nail enamel and built it into one of the largest cosmetics companies in America. His lasting invention was not a product but a rhythm: colour matched across lips and nails, launched as an event, and retired for the next one.
Eunice W. Johnson created, produced and directed the Ebony Fashion Fair, a travelling charity fashion show that ran for fifty years. In 1973 she launched Fashion Fair Cosmetics, made in shades for deeper skin tones that the department-store brands did not supply.
Kevyn Aucoin published make-up technique as a sequence of photographs with the products named, reframing a face as something built rather than a set of flaws to be minimised.
Pat McGrath became the first make-up artist to be made a dame, in 2021, for services to fashion, beauty and diversity. Her company was valued at a billion dollars in 2018, written down steeply after 2022 and restructured through Chapter 11 in 2026, while she became creative director of Louis Vuitton's first make-up line.
Rihanna launched Fenty Beauty in 2017 as a fifty-fifty venture with LVMH. The forty-shade foundation made the headlines; the lasting change was the model it proved, a celebrity founder whose own appearances are the brand's advertising, down to a compact produced mid-song at the Super Bowl.
Selena Gomez launched Rare Beauty in September 2020, with a fund for youth mental health built into its sales. By 2024 Bloomberg judged her a billionaire, almost entirely on the strength of her stake in the company, an estimate of a private business that publishes no audited accounts.
Hailey Bieber launched Rhode in June 2022 with three products sold on its own website. Three years later e.l.f. Beauty bought it for up to a billion dollars, a price for the audience its founder had built as much as for its formulas.
