There are household companies in each trade, and in magnificence, they are usually matriarchies. This is sensible as a result of many of the recommendation we get on the right way to apply make-up to our options is handed down by our moms and their moms and so forth, to say nothing of the options themselves. It’s a part of our inheritance. And for some, there may be a lot extra — in {dollars}, in shares, in legacies — to uphold.

However this isn’t a narrative about household magnificence companies; that is about cosmetics dynasties. Nepotism apart, all through historical past, a pure course in life is that some youngsters take up the work of their mother and father. In a number of circumstances that work entails huge company equipment, beloved, decades-old product strains, and hundreds of thousands — if not billions — of {dollars}. As an example, A’Lelia Bundles nonetheless carries the torch for her great-great grandmother Madam C.J. Walker, the hair-care magnate, and, in response to Guinness World Data, America’s first feminine self-made millionaire.

Bundles, a journalist and writer, has biographed the ladies in her household and contributed to a Netflix sequence about Walker, starring Octavia Spencer. For 3 generations, Walker’s feminine descendents have taken the identify A’Lelia. Her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, went from being president of the corporate’s East Coast operations to a determine within the Harlem Renaissance.

Sisley Paris, the French magnificence label constructed by Countess Isabelle d’Ornano and her husband, Hubert, has employed two generations of d’Ornanos. The youngest, Isabelle’s granddaughter Daria Botin d’Ornano, handles digital content material.

In school, Aerin Lauder rotated via internships in several hamlets of her grandmother Estée Lauder’s cosmetics empire — artistic at Clinique, advertising at Estée — earlier than touchdown her first full-time job on the advertising crew for Prescriptives. Aerin is now the model and picture director for Estée Lauder; one latest undertaking included repackaging the model’s Re-Nutriv Diamond Sculpted Transformative Cream in a limited-edition jar impressed by the Gracie wallpaper that lined her grandmother’s workplace.

Aerin had been working at Estée for 25 years, and a residing Lauder for about 42, when she launched her personal perfume and residential decor label, Aerin. On the time she noticed a spot out there for a heritage model that was unapologetically female. “Heritage is absolutely essential,” Lauder mentioned. “In an effort to know the place you are going, you must know the place you’ve got come from.”