ROUGE

When cosmetics mogul Josephine Herz dies, she leaves behind a multibillion dollar empire. But will her archrival’s lawsuit strip her of her greatest achievement?

Inspired by the real-life rivalry between Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden, celebrity adman Kirshenbaum's (Isn't that Rich? Life Among the 1%, 2015, etc.) novel beguilingly documents the stunning, parallel rise of these women in the cosmetics industry. “An English girl raised in Canada,” Constance Gardiner follows her half brother, James, to New York City after a detour through a Seven Sisters college. Securing a job with a pharmaceutical company, Constance seizes the opportunity to learn everything about business. In a few short years, she's launched her own company with the novel concept of an elegant army of door-to-door saleswomen. Her Gardiner Girls idea not only puts her products directly in women’s hands, but also builds a marketing strategy that offers employment opportunities to women. Constance also hires CeeCee Lopez, a black woman who will make her own mark on the cosmetics world with her novel hair relaxer. Meanwhile, Josephine, a young Jewish woman fleeing anti-Semitism in post–WWI Poland, settles in Melbourne, Australia. While working at her uncle’s drugstore, Josephine swiftly realizes that she can sell more face cream to women if she connects the product to psychological desire. Within months, she has rented her own counter space and founded a successful cosmetics company that will soon expand to Sydney, London, Paris, and New York. As Constance and Josephine shrewdly negotiate the business world, their every move mirrors the other’s. Against a background of the Holocaust, women’s entrance into the workforce, secret gay culture, and McCarthyism, their marriages rise and fail, product lines and marketing innovations take the world by storm...or falter. And at the center is the fight over the world’s first over-the-counter mascara: Who invented it first?

A vivid portrait of glamorous, feisty women contending for the crown of cosmetics queen.