EARLY LIFE
Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens in 1906, to her parents, Rose Schotz Rosenthal and Max Mentzer. Lausder was the second born in her family. Her mothers, mothers side of the family was French Catholic and her mothers fathers side of the family was Hungarian Jewish . Rose emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1898 with her five children to join her then husband, Abraham Rosenthal. But, in 1905, she married Max Mentzer, a shopkeeper of Hungarian Jewish descent who had also immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. When their daughter was born, they wanted to name her Esty, after her mother's favorite Hungarian aunt. When the clerk was suppoed to write out the birth certificate, and her mother chose Esther because Esty seemed so unusual that she thought no one would know how to spell it. Esty became her parents' nickname for her, which sounded like Estée when her father pronounced it in his Hungarian accent. She attended Newtown High School in Elmhurst, New York. Much of her childhood was spent trying to make ends meet. Like most of her eight siblings, she helped out at the family's hardware store, where she got her first taste of business, of entrepreneurship and what it takes to be a successful retailer. Her girlhood dream was to become an actress with her “name in lights, flowers and handsome men.
Lauder showed her interest in beauty at an early age. She loved to brush her mother's long hair and apply creams to her face. Through her uncle, a chemist, Lauder later learned how to make her own beauty creams. She was only a teenager when she started selling her products at local hair salons. Lauder marketed her wares as "jars of hope" and even gave out free samples.
In 1939, she married Joseph H. Lauter (later Lauder), a businessman in the garment industry. The couple welcomed their first child, son Leonard, in 1933. Not letting motherhood slow her down, Lauder continued to develop her beauty business. She divorced her husband in 1939, but the pair remarried three years later. In 1944, Lauder gave birth to the couple's second son, Ronald.
"I was a woman with a mission and single-minded in the pursuit of my dream".