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.

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.

Between 1887 and 1893, at the height of her career as the head of her cosmetics company, Blanche Howard, a finishing school mistress in Stuttgart, Germany, turned Ayer's daughters, who were enrolled there, against her.

Her husband Herbert Copeland Ayer turned out to be an alcoholic philanderer; a later partner, General E. Burd Grubb, left her for a younger woman; and the man who funded her business, James Seymour, proved to be a swindler and a rake.

Ayer's mental symptoms, a combination of "Melancholia" and addiction to doctor prescribed morphine for headaches, exhaustion, and insomnia, led to her commitment as a ‘lunatic.’ It took fourteen months for her to escape from the Bronxville Insane Asylum.

Although she did not belong to the emergent feminist movements of her day, she epitomized the independent woman, played a part in the new mass journalism, and paved the way for later women entrepreneurs.