Harriet Hubbard Ayer

Harriet Hubbard Ayer (June 27, 1849, Chicago, Illinois – November 25, 1903, New York City) was an American cosmetics entrepreneur and journalist during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a Chicago socialite. She became famous for having initiated the first cosmetic company in the United States and for fighting to maintain her business against male predators. She set the stage for later female cosmetic moguls.

Ayer was a victim of kidnapping and also suffered from madness, but was able to reinvent herself during the last seven years of her life as the highest paid newspaper woman in the United States. She was highly regarded as the author of articles about beauty, health, and etiquette for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Her essays were compiled into a popular book in 1899 that was reissued in 1974 and more recently in an abbreviated format in 2005.

She was a proto-feminist, and her articles influenced women across the United States and abroad. While Helena Rubinstein, Elizabeth Arden, Hazel Bishop, and Estee Lauder are held in high regard as early women entrepreneurs in the cosmetics field, Harriet Hubbard Ayer was one of the first to have a successful career in the beauty industry.

Harriet Hubbard Ayer was a Chicago socialite who, by necessity, turned away from her privileged world to achieve wealth and success in business at a time when most genteel women did not work. On October 2, 1866, at the age of seventeen, she married Herbert Copeland Ayer, a man fourteen years her senior.

After separating from Herbert at the end of 1882 she took her two daughters, Hattie and Margaret, and moved to New York City. The collapse of the Ayer iron business in 1883, compounded by her mother’s dwindling inheritance, rendered Harriet almost destitute. These circumstances provided the critical motivation for her resolve to support herself and her daughters in the style to which they were accustomed. In desperation Ayer accepted a job as a saleswoman and interior designer for antique furniture store, Sypher’s. On one of her frequent business trips to Europe seeking treasures for clients, she discovered a chemist in Paris who created creams and perfumes. Eventually, she bought from him the formula for a face cream that reputedly had been used by the famous French beauty Madame Recamier (1777–1849), and created her own product.

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