Hazel Bishop - Infinite Women

Born: 17 August 1906, United States
Died: 5 December 1998
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

Chemist Hazel Bishop revolutionized cosmetics in 1950 when she started a company selling the first long-lasting lipstick, which she’d developed in the ’40s. Her mother reportedly told her that having one’s own business was the path to independence.
Bishop earned her Bachelor’s in chemistry from Barnard College in 1929, taking a job in a dermatological laboratory at the College of Physicians and Surgeons as an assistant in 1935. There, she would help Dr. A. Benson Cannon with work that he would later use to launch the hypoallergenic cosmetics line Almay. During World War II, she worked as an organic chemist for Standard Oil Development Company, designing airplane fuels, later doing similar work for Socony Vacuum Oil Company before starting her cosmetics company. In her spare time, she had been conducting her own experiments to create a smudge-proof, long-lasting lipstick that would get professional women through a work day. She used staining dyes, which stained the skin with color, mixed with oils and molten wax.
Unfortunately, althought Bishop’s Long-Lasting Lipstick was making the company more than $10 million a year by 1953, Bishop had made a poor choice in business partners that resulted in her being forced out of her own company the year after she started it, resulting in a lawsuit and a 1954 settlement. By that point, she’d already started the successful Hazel Bishop Laboratories to develop consumer products like leather cleaner and solid-stick perfumes.
She moved on to Wall Street in 1962, finding success as a financial analyst at a brokerage firm and later working for a decade as a consultant on cosmetics and pharmaceutical stocks. She switched careers again in 1978, into academia. In 1980, she became the Revlon Chair of Cosmetics Marketing at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, helping launch its Cosmetology, Fragrance, and Toiletries program.