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Elizabeth Arden

Elizabeth Arden is the professional name of Florence Nightingale Graham, who opened a beauty salon with a red door on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1910. The house was among the first cosmetics companies to launch a perfume, in the 1930s with Blue Grass. It has belonged to the Revlon group since 2016.

Elizabeth Arden perfumes

A red door on Fifth Avenue

Florence Nightingale Graham, born in 1878, opened her first New York salon in 1910 and took the name Elizabeth Arden. The salon's red door became the house's trademark, carried over onto its storefronts and, decades later, onto its bottles.

She would open forty-one salons in her lifetime and build a concept of beauty combining skincare, makeup and perfume. She died in 1966; the company has changed hands several times since, without the red door ever leaving its identity.

Blue Grass and drugstore counter perfumes

Blue Grass came out in the 1930s and ranks among the first perfumes launched by a cosmetics house rather than a fashion house or a perfumer. The brand long sold its perfumes at the same counter as its skincare products.

Red Door arrived in 1989 and borrowed its name from the original salon. Sunflowers followed in 1993, 5th Avenue in 1996, Green Tea in 1999, the latter since extended into a long series of eaux de parfum.

From hand to hand, up to Revlon

Eli Lilly bought the company in 1971, Fabergé in 1987, and it passed through Unilever before being acquired in the early 2000s by FFI Fragrances, which took its name. Revlon bought it in 2016 for around eight hundred seventy million dollars.

Elizabeth Arden Inc. also holds perfume licenses for celebrities and third-party houses, including Britney Spears, Elizabeth Taylor and Halston, making the company as much a licensing operator as a brand under its own name.