Evelyn Lauder (August 12, 1936 – November 12, 2011) was an American socialite and philanthropist who has been credited as one of the creators and popularizers of the pink ribbon as a symbol for awareness of breast cancer.
Evelyn Hausner was born in Vienna and grew up in New York City. While attending Hunter College from which she graduated in 1958, she met her husband Leonard on a blind date. She also took graduate courses at Northwestern University. The couple were married in July 1959. After the marriage, she left her job as a public school teacher and went to work with her husband at the company founded by her mother-in-law in 1946, which sold six products at the time: a red lipstick, creams, lotions and Youth Dew fragrance in a bath oil.
Lauder was the Senior Corporate Vice President of the Estée Lauder Companies and a member of the board of overseers at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Lauder personally raised much of the $13.6 million that went to create the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, which opened in October 1992 and focuses on the treatment and diagnosis of breast cancer. She helped raise an additional $5 million to create an endowment to be used to fund clinical research there.
Self magazine's first annual issue for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month came after an April 1991 lunch at the 21 Club, at which Lauder discussed ideas for articles about breast cancer with her friend Alexandra Penney, who was then serving as editor of Self.
Together with Penney, Lauder established The Breast Cancer Research Foundation and formalized the pink ribbon as a symbol for breast cancer awareness as part of Self magazine's second annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month issue in 1992. Penney's inspiration to improve on the success of the magazine's first annual issue was to create a ribbon that would be placed in Estee Lauder's New York City stores. Lauder made the commitment to have the ribbons placed on the company's cosmetics counters across the United States.
By 1993, Lauder had overseen the creation of a new shade called Pink Ribbon that was part of her personal and corporate effort to raise breast cancer awareness. Her husband paid for the cost of registering The Breast Cancer Research Foundation in all 50 states. By the start of 1995, some $900,000 had been raised for the foundation, including $120,000 from the sale of Pink Ribbon lipstick and blusher and $190,000 from the sale of the Clinique Berry Kiss pink lipstick.
By October 2008, the Estée Lauder Companies estimated that the firm's Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign had raised $35 million towards research and distributed 80 million pink ribbons.
Leonard and Evelyn Lauder's son William is executive chairman of Estee Lauder Cos. Another son, Gary, is managing director of Lauder Partners LLC, a technology investment firm.
(Sources: NY Times, Wiki, Yahoo, NPR)
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