Pretty in Pink
Remembering Mary Kay.

By Kathryn Jean Lopez, NRO exectutive editor
December 1-2, 2001

ou can do it, honey." That's what Mary Kay Ash heard "thousands of times" from her mother while growing up.

From the time Mary Kay was seven years old, her father was an invalid, stricken with tuberculosis. Her mother was forced by circumstances to support the family, leaving the young girl with household responsibilities far beyond her years.

If Daddy wanted chili or chicken or whatever for dinner, and I didn't know how to cook it, I would call my mother. During those days, I rarely had the opportunity to learn anything from her in person — she just couldn't be there to teach me. But how often I have said since then, 'Thank God for the telephone!' That was my lifeline during those years, and my main contact with my mother.

At age 45, Mary Kay Ash and her husband Mel put down their savings to start a cosmetics company, in part to keep mothers from having to have a phone between them and their children.

With "the confidence my mother instilled in me," she would write in her (pink) autobiography Mary Kay, "I developed a strategy and a philosophy for my dream company, and invested my life savings in it." Salespeople had been recruited and hired. Boxes, bottles, and jars were printed with "Beauty By Mary Kay," the company's original name. Everything was set.

But then the dream nearly died, with her husband. It was one month to the day before their cosmetics company was to open. "My husband and I were having breakfast, and he was reading the final percentage figures. I was listening very much like a woman does when her husband is talking about the budget — with half an ear, feeling that was 'his problem.' At that moment, he suffered a fatal heart attack."

Believing work was the way to get through the grief of her husband's death, Mary Kay decided to go forward with Mary Kay Cosmetics — despite her trusted accountant telling her that it would be impossible and ultimately leave her penniless. Mary Kay debuted — on Friday the 13th — in September of 1963.

Mary Kay Ash died on Thanksgiving Day, 2001, anything but penniless. But even richer are her pink ladies, the over 850,000 women, in 37 countries, who sell Mary Kay Cosmetics worldwide.

For Mary Kay, her namesake company wasn't a job or an ego trip. It was her way of passing the message of self-confidence her mother had instilled in her to a world of women who desperately need it. "Sometimes I feel like Ann Landers," Ash would say. She would refer to Mary Kay beauty consultants as her "daughters." Forbes magazine recognized her pink magic, naming Mary Kay Cosmetics one of the "100 Best Companies to Work for in America."

In fact, for her it was a bit of a vocation. Her Christian duty. An alternative feminist revolution. She wrote in her autobiography:

In 1963, the women's movement had not yet begun — but here was a company that would give women all the opportunities I never had. I don't think God wanted a world in which a woman would have to work fourteen hours a day to support her family, as my mother had done. I believe He used this company as a vehicle to give women a chance. And I feel very humble and very fortunate to have had a part in showing other women the way.

But Mary Kay was no martyr. She was beautiful and she knew it. She spoiled herself in her success — built a marvelous, 30-room pink mansion in Dallas, Texas, where Mary Kay Cosmetics is headquarters. She bought furs and cars — especially pink Cadillacs.

And she encouraged her ladies to do so too. Femininity is essential to being a woman, and she wanted her Mary Kay family to know that it was okay for them to be ladies, to be beautiful and have beautiful things.

Take the diamond bumblebees.

A woman with a diamond bumblebee pin has "flown to the top." The pin is like a first-prize trophy in Mary Kay-ese, awarded to Mary Kay cosmetics' top saleswomen. Ash's husband had once given her a bumblebee pin, and it went over so well that she made it a part of the company. Again, in her delightful autobiography, Mary Kay explains why it was such a natural fit:

We think the bumblebee is a marvelous symbol of woman. Because, as aerodynamic engineers found a long time ago, the bumblebee cannot fly! Its wings are too weak and its body is too heavy to fly, but, fortunately, the bumblebee doesn't know that, and it goes right on flying. The bee has become a symbol of women who didn't know they could fly but they DID! I think the women who own these diamond bumblebees think of them in their own personal ways. For most of us, it's true that we refused to believe we couldn't do it. Maybe somebody said, "It's really impossible to get this thing off the ground." But somebody else told us, "You can do it!" So we did.

Mary Kay made her incentive "Cinderella gifts" a signature part of Mary Kaydom. National sales directors drive around in pink Cadillacs. Other gifts include luxurious vacations and diamonds. These gifts, Mary Kay said in a 1995 interview, are "things that you wouldn't go out and buy if you were just given the money, because you'd be paying the mortgage and buying the children's clothes and all those kinds of things. So we give things like Cadillacs and diamond rings and exotic trips and things like that that you'd love to have but probably wouldn't buy for yourself."

And the women she taught and loved and spoiled — loved her back. They recognized Mary Kay for what she was, and her company for what it is: the National Organization for Women that wasn't. A company, as Mary Kay would say, "especially" for women. (But not exclusively: Her then-20-year-old son Richard, for instance, was with his mother to assist her after her husband died; he's now chairman.) Women can make their own hours. They can think about, as the company motto implored them, God first, family second, and their business lives third. They could be servants, wives, mothers, and people before being businesswomen.

But they could be successful businesswomen too. And if you think these are all southern debutantes and socialite wives, think again. Mary Kay, one consultant told me, "is the American Dream," accessible to women the dream might never have reached without the dream of its founder. Women who would never have the opportunity to own a McDonald's franchise become small-business owners as Mary Kay consultants. The Cinderella gifts are just fun window dressing.

How would Mary Kay like to be remembered? She told a 1994 interviewer,

As far as I am concerned, our legacy will be that we have helped hundreds of thousands of women find out how great they really are. And that they can do anything in this world they want to do if they want to do it bad enough — and are willing to pay the price.

When the price is doing it your way — without forsaking God and family — it ain't too bad.