Elizabeth Arden

While working in a New York beauty salon 1908, Florence Nightingale Graham (1881-1966) became known as “the little Canadian woman with the magic hands.” An ambitious nursing school dropout from Woodbridge, Ontario, she borrowed “Elizabeth” from a former business partner and “Arden” from the Tennyson poem “Enoch Arden” and began formulating her own cosmetics as Elizabeth Arden. Her company was reporting annual sales of $60 million when she died in 1966 and remains a major cosmetics firm today.