Aida Grey, Skin Care Innovator, Dies : Cosmetics: Franchise founder created relatively inexpensive wares to ward off tired skin.
Aida Grey, the doyenne of skin care who founded a series of cosmetic franchises that today are busy battling wrinkles and the other menacing marks of age, died Friday night.
A spokeswoman for her Beverly Hills-based company said Miss Grey, the daughter of a French dermatologist who had battled acne as a teen-ager, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
She had been ill for some time and her death was attributed to heart failure.
The cosmetics counselor to Marilyn Monroe and hundreds of thousands of lesser-known women and men in the United States and Europe was always secretive about her age. She was believed to be in her mid-80s, although she did not look it and denied that she had ever had a face lift.
It was Aida Grey products that kept Aida Grey looking 20 years younger than she was, she liked to say.
Her credo was: “Everybody’s born with good skin. . . . It’s what you do with your skin that counts.”
And in a town where appearance often ranks ahead of reality she offered women (and later men) relatively inexpensive wares to ward off tired skin.
Among them were cucumber lotions, raspberry masks and time-release mini-facials. She wrote and spoke extensively about skin care, advocating her collagen moisturizers, in-store facials and deep-pore cleaning to restore and maintain the diminishing glow of youth.
Among her most innovative creations was a seaweed facial that lasts 90 minutes and leaves a mask that is lifted from the client’s face.
In 1987, Women’s Wear Daily estimated her annual wholesale volume at $4 million to $5 million. The more than 100 franchises she launched in the United States, Kenya, Portugal, Ireland and elsewhere receive big discounts for purchasing the estimated 150 items shipped from a huge warehouse in Beverly Hills, home of her extravagant Institute de Beaute on Wilshire Boulevard.
But Miss Grey, in an accent that reflected her French heritage, said she never sought fame while amassing a small fortune.
Instead, it was individual service that brought her satisfaction.
“It has to be custom-style,” she said in 1987. “We blend everything and we match things to people. I don’t want mass production.”
She was among the first to preach the advantages of holistic treatments, using fruits, vegetables and herbs.
Miss Grey began her beauty empire in the 1940s after finding, she said, that she was allergic to her own cosmetics. Her first salon was a relatively modest 5,000-square-foot treatment and makeup center in Beverly Hills. From the beginning, she said she never claimed, as did so many others, that her treatments could remove wrinkles.
“Only plastic surgery removes wrinkles,” she would say. But her creams and lotions (some of which sold for only $5 or $6) could help postpone that procedure or make it unnecessary.
Many of those who sought her advice and guidance could have paid 10 times her prices: among them Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, Julie Christie, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset, Nancy Reagan and Miss Monroe, who Miss Grey said “was not a great beauty.”
For all her public posturing, she was a private person. A Los Angeles Times reporter in 1979 asked about her private life and in response was told about the benefits of ginseng lotion.
All Miss Grey would advance without reluctance was: “I was put on this earth to help people look better. That is what I am all about.”
She said that because of her modest prices, women who had resigned themselves to looking old could slow or reverse the process.
And they did not have to sleep with a gooey night cream on their skin. “You’re wasting your time and your love life. Your skin is like your stomach, it thrives on very small meals, very frequently.”
Creams and lotions should be used only 20 minutes and then removed. “And no makeup or skin care product should cost $100 unless it’s in a gallon jug.”
While the heart of her operation was in sunny Southern California, she preached that sun and healthy skin were adversaries.
Her charitable works included complimentary consultations to the UCLA School of Public Health, the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, St. Anne’s Maternity Home, the Veterans Administration and many more.
Among her other honors, she was named “entrepreneur of the year” by the Los Angeles YWCA in 1991. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery has recognized her efforts to improve the understanding of their specialty.
She continued to write beauty columns for newspapers and magazines until shortly before her recent illness. Her Encyclopedia of Beauty is scheduled to be published soon.
In person, she was “slightly flamboyant,” wrote a Times fashion writer several years ago. “Pleasantly rounded, perfectly manicured, conservatively coiffed . . . (she) commands attention wherever she goes.”
It was an aura, Miss Grey said, she had created for herself and which any woman could emulate. And it was her hope that “every woman will do just that.”
In her memory, her Beverly Hills and Biltmore Hotel salons will be closed Monday so employees may attend her funeral at noon at Mt. Sinai.
Survivors include her husband, Douglas Behrend, an attorney; a son, Steven; a daughter, Loretta Dix; six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
