A sweeping biography of one of the most influential and successful business-women in American history, BECOMING ELIZABETH ARDEN opens the Red Door to a world of wealth, glamor, and the profitable business of beauty Elizabeth Arden was a household name on six continents and a millionaire several times over before her death in 1966. Arden counted British royalty and social elites from the overlapping worlds of New York, Hollywood, London, and Paris among her clients. She revolutionized skin care and cosmetics, making it acceptable for all women to embrace glamour and wear makeup—not just actresses and prostitutes. She created a successful international business empire before women gained the vote and at a time when virtually no woman owned or ran a national company. She developed the first luxury spa and insisted on a holistic understanding of health and beauty. Unconventional and driven, Arden fervently believed that every woman could be beautiful. Acclaimed biographer Stacy Cordery does full justice to one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs. Canadian-born Florence Nightingale Graham turned herself into Elizabeth Arden, using her uncanny sense of the possible to take full advantage of everything New York City offered, building her company and becoming one with her brand. In an astounding rags-to-riches tale, Elizabeth Arden came to personify sophistication and refinement. Her hard work and innovation made makeup, fitness, and style not only acceptable but de rigueur. Arden prospered throughout the Depression, reimagined women’s needs during two World Wars, and by pioneering new approaches to marketing and advertising, ushered beauty into the modern era. Cordery delivers a compelling picture of a modern CEO whose career provides a model for aspiring businesses to this day.

Born at the start of the Civil War, Juliette "Daisy" Gordon Low struggled to reconcile being a good Southern belle with being true to her adventurous spirit. Accidentally deafened, she married a dashing British patrician and moved to England, where she quickly became dissatisfied with the aimlessness of privileged life. Her search for greater purpose ended when she met Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and was inspired to recreate his program for girls. The Girl Scouts of the USA—which can now count more than fifty-nine million American girls and women among its past members—aims to instill useful skills and moral values in its young members, with an emphasis on fun. In this lively and accessible biography of its intrepid founder, Stacy A. Cordery paints a dynamic portrait of an intriguing woman and a true pioneer whose work touched the lives of millions of girls and women around the world.

A biography of Elizabeth Arden, examining her life and success in the beauty business.

The author of the “suspenseful, atmospheric, and completely riveting” (Megan Miranda, New York Times bestselling author) debut The Winter Sister returns with a darkly thrilling novel about a woman who comes to believe that she has a connection to a decades old kidnapping and now that the victim has gone missing again, begins a frantic search to learn what happened in the past. When Fern Douglas sees the news about Astrid Sullivan, a thirty-four-year-old missing woman from Maine, she is positive that she knows her. Fern’s husband is sure it’s because of Astrid’s famous kidnapping—and equally famous return—twenty years ago, but Fern has no memory of that, even though it happened an hour outside her New Hampshire hometown. And when Astrid appears in Fern’s recurring nightmare, one in which a girl reaches out to her, pleading, Fern fears that it’s not a dream at all, but a memory. Back home in New Hampshire, Fern purchases a copy of Astrid’s recently published memoir—which may have provoked her original kidnapper to abduct her again—and as she reads through its chapters and visits the people and places within it, she discovers more evidence that she has an unsettling connection to the missing woman. As Fern’s search becomes increasingly desperate, she hopes to remember her past so she can save Astrid in the present…before it’s too late. Featuring Megan Collins’s signature “dark, tense, and completely absorbing” (Booklist) prose and plenty of shocking twists and turns, Behind the Red Door is an arresting thriller that will haunt you long after you turn the last page.

Photos of Theodore Roosevelt throughout his life.

From the outside looking in, Keisha Lee has a fairy-tale life. Beautiful and rich, she has all the material things a woman desires. But those things come with a price. After being betrayed by her mother, Isabella, and her controlling boyfriend, Dino and surviving an attempt to end her life, she decides to take charge of her own destiny, no longer being the naive girl her best friends, Tameka and Sherrie, knew. Refusing to give up her luxurious lifestyle or to submit to another man's authority, this femme fatale and her friends make treacherous moves to come up. They learn that nothing is off limits when it comes to love, money, power and revenge.

Discusses the life of American beauty empire builder, Elizabeth Arden, whose genius at changing public opinion about women who wore makeup, led her to become a success in establishing her beauty salons throughout the world.

In 1908, Florence Nightingale Graham moved from the suburbs of Toronto, Canada to Manhattan with dreams of becoming a self-made woman. Within two years, she opened her first beauty salon on Fifth Avenue. Adopting the same name as her company, Elizabeth Arden went on to pioneer the global beauty industry (valued at $532 billion today). At a time when women didn't have the right to vote, Elizabeth became one of the wealthiest self-made women in the world and the first businesswoman to grace the cover of Time magazine. By the end of the 1930s, it was said "there are only three American names known in every single corner of the globe: Singer Sewing, Coca Cola, and Elizabeth Arden." One hundred years later, in 2008, at the age of eighteen, Louise Johnson moved from the suburbs of Toronto, Canada to Manhattan to begin her dream internship at the cosmetic giant, Elizabeth Arden. She knew nothing about the beauty industry, but was fascinated by the woman behind the brand whose inspiring legacy was at risk of falling through the cracks of history. Although they lived a century apart, Elizabeth became Louise's invisible guide as she tried her "successful" lifestyle on for size, with a big career in a big city-but behind the glitz and the glamour, they soon struggled to recognize their true selves. Who are we really behind the makeup we put on our faces? Behind the social media highlight reels? Behind the personas we (consciously and subconsciously) present to the world? This book brings you behind the red doors of Arden, while Louise's story serves to highlight how much (or how little) has changed a century later. What began as a desire to preserve Elizabeth's place in history, evolved into an examination of her coming-of-age in the beauty industry and a cultural excavation on a much larger thread that connects us all. Ultimately, this book is about identity and how we learn to navigate the world to find our best self, even if it's on a different path than we originally anticipated.