How Mary Kay Built an Empire Out of Other Women’s Dreams
The go-getter woman needs a better alibi, or else to quit telling stories. Is that Kamala Harris, peeping out from beneath her collapsed tent, smugly threatening the American people with another run? Harris cannot read a room, apparently, but then there’s always the point at which a go-getter woman, like her male analogues in government or business—not that, in our era, these institutions are much distinguished—grows unaccustomed to spaces unpeopled with acolytes. Were she inclined to take in the outside air, she might discern a years-in-the-making change in the wind. The go-getter woman, or girlboss, as that type is now known, has worn out her welcome, and it is not only the misogynists—cleverly and less cleverly disguised—who feel this way. Today, in contrast with ten and twenty and thirty years ago, her tale of freedom is rather suspect, for it is a freedom known not to trickle down.
In this era of cultural politics that progressive millennials refer to as Woke 2.0, the excesses of corporate so-called feminism are as plain as the enhanced faces cropping up around us. Ubiquitous images of the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and of Lauren Sánchez Bezos have, in tandem with word of young men imbibing eugenics alongside their creatine, renewed a certain public’s fascination with how an orientation premised upon whiteness, gender essentialism, and wealth accumulation makes for bizarre faces. Yet it would be wise to cast our gaze beyond the unblended eyeshadow and the tight skin of what’s been labelled Republican makeup and Mar-a-Lago face. A beauty doctrine of conspicuous consumption and empowerment of the few finds followers both left and right of center.
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The writer and professional trend forecaster Ayesha A. Siddiqi has written of our ramping confluence of beauty and health, of the compulsory and product-laden habits that exemplify this era of bipartisan austerity, of public health whittled into personal maintenance. Beauty routines, promulgated as a measure of the good life, provide what Siddiqi describes as a “theater of exception” from inequality. Empowerment is sourced from what goes on the skin. A decade ago, we blasphemed Audre Lorde in calling such consumerist rituals “self-care” and claiming them as feminist; this template was made trendy fifty-three years earlier by Mary Kathlyn Wagner Rogers, not yet known as Mary Kay, who founded her eponymous cosmetics line in 1963 and whose entrepreneurial triumphs would drape the usual salesman’s maxims in diamonds, wigs, and lots and lots of pink. She did not invent the sale of cure-all lotions and potions—snake oil has a long tail in American life—but she did feminize it, giving the proto-girlboss her first shot of good press.
Mary Kay’s rise—as relayed in speeches, company literature, and news outlets that seldom check their facts—reads like myth. A new book, however, intends to surface biography from beneath self-styled allegory: “Selling Opportunity,” by Mary Lisa Gavenas. Mary Kay sold much throughout her life, culminating in a line of products whose touted rejuvenating properties, preached by downline saleswomen numbering in the thousands, would amass her a personal fortune of ninety-eight million dollars, with her namesake company reporting $2.8 billion in revenue in 2022. But makeup paled beside the greater sell: women’s selling (for) themselves. The Mary Kay line made only a few women aside from her very rich. It left generations of others with dreams and stockpiles of unsold makeup, keeping them fed by what, in the U.S., emulates nourishment: faith in a personal success that will transcend our collective condition.
She was born in a good firmament for coming-up stories. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Texas was booming with boomtowns—Houston, say, where a hop, skip, and twenty or so miles got one to Cypress, a fountain not of oil but of hot springs. Resorts, and their sulfurous “miracle cures,” were the rage. Alex and Lula Wagner found work on the grounds of the Hot Well Hotel with hopes of hitting pay dirt. But their boom had not happened by the time their fourth child, listed in Harris County records as a “healthy white female” and later named Mary Kathlyn, arrived the night after her mother’s shift on May 12, 1918. Nor had it when Spanish influenza arrived shortly thereafter. Nor would it ever. This was one disappointment of many for the Wagners, who “never seemed to own land, never seemed to be working for themselves,” Gavenas writes. “Scheme after scheme ended with banks and business partners suing for garnishment.”
They were the sort of working-class whites for whom race was the safety net of last resort; it meant that, when the family relocated to Houston proper, overpaying many times over for a mortgage in the Sixth Ward, its youngest member would benefit from the educational movement taking hold of the burgeoning city’s white schools. Beginning in the nineteen-twenties, millions of dollars were poured into making those schools great, with a new curriculum foregrounding civics and self-improvement. Ideal students were thought to excel “with little or no assistance from the teacher,” bolstering Houston’s renown as the seat of self-made prosperity in America. Teen-age Mary Kay was an A student, collecting distinctions in speaking and typing. When she was fourteen, her exemplary citizenship won her an American Legion School Award. She finished high school early, at sixteen, and matriculated into marriage, as was common; Mary Kay’s era, Gavenas reminds us, was seldom promising even for girls of her pluck. Women’s work inside the home, no less now than then, doesn’t pay, and women’s work outside the home hardly did. Nor would Mary Kay have made an attractive candidate for underpaid domestic work in others’ homes, “not when Houston was bursting with Mexicans, African Americans, and desperate Dust Bowl refugees,” as Gavenas phrases it. But Mary Kay did not begrudge marriage. She would later tell of grabbing her man, whom she dubbed the “Elvis Presley of Houston,” with both hands. They eloped—and on a hot, dry July day, in 1934, Mary Kathlyn Wagner became Mrs. Julius Ben Rogers. The name would not stick.
The nineteen-year-old Ben Rogers, whom the sixteen-year-old Mary Kay thought to be “a tremendous catch,” possessed “no property, no prospects, no savings.” That condition was little changed by marriage or the couple’s first child, born within a week of Mary Kay’s seventeenth birthday, in 1935, or their second, born the following year. In 1938, Mary Kay’s father died of a heart attack, and her husband assumed his position at the local grocery store. Rogers was no provider—he soon fled the gig. Traditional values were not allotting their promised dividends. The family needed money.
Mary Kay had tried her hand at direct, door-to-door sales before. She was once enchanted with a Depression-era racket called the “Child Psychology Bookshelf”: badly printed, seldom-used encyclopedias filled with moral tales, sold on installment plans to poor mothers wanting the best for their children. (Her network of neighbors, friends, and the congregation of the Tabernacle Baptist Church that the family attended, who later complained about the quality of what they’d been sold, was wrung dry after nine months.) After Rogers left his job at the store, husband and wife had a go at a similar scheme, shilling aluminum cookware for the company Wear-Ever Aluminum (still extant as WearEver Cookware). They employed a sales technique that would become known as the party plan, a method that worked by leveraging ideals of American domesticity: In someone’s home, a husband rhapsodizes about the company’s products—the superior taste and added nutrition of food prepared in them; the wife, meanwhile, proves at least part of that claim by cooking something right there. “Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were instructed never to use the word buy,” but, rather, “adopt, invest, place in your home,” Gavenas writes. In the event of pushback, the couple might gently tsk, “The health of your children is worth more than the price of a few miserable pots and pans.”
Go-getter that Mary Kay was—and that her husband wasn’t—she was soon back at it, solo this time. The iron was hot: direct-sales companies were embracing women like her, married women whose domestic situations necessitated additional and remunerative labor that would not disturb those domestic situations. (The beauty-products company Avon, an outlier, had boasted a legion of saleswomen since 1886.) Stanley Home Products welcomed women into its salesforce in 1939. Ads recruited “women with knowledge of tidy housekeeping,” dangling the promise of as much as thirty-five dollars a week in earnings. Mary Kay sent two dollars to the company and received in return a demonstration case filled with its products. It was meant to coax twenty dollars worth of orders per party they hosted. That number was still a pipe dream weeks later when, as the story goes, Mary Kay borrowed twelve dollars to hightail it to Dallas for a Stanley sales rally. The lender, a friend, thought the money would be better spent on essentials. “True, she had demonstrated no aptitude for selling,” Gavenas writes. “But Stanley sales literature assured her that didn’t matter. Gumption was what counted.” At the rally, Mary Kay watched a Corpus Christi housewife crowned Queen of Sales and awarded an alligator handbag for her efforts, and she resolved to be in her place by the following year.
By the nineteen-forties, the rebranding of the American salesman as an independent go-getter was well under way, powered by his—and her—exclusion from New Deal labor protections. As the journalist Bridget Read writes in her shrewd and chilling “Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America,” from 2025, direct-sales companies, faced with a safety net and minimum wage that might ameliorate conditions for workers at the executives’ expense, lobbied for the exclusion of their workforce from the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Swayed, Congress agreed that the direct-selling industry, along with agriculture and domestic service, was made of not employees—to whom benefits and protections were owed—but “independent contractors,” to whom nothing was owed, not even from the entities profiting from their labor. (Today, the Direct Selling Association, formerly the N.A.A.C., still recounts this sleight-of-hand politicking as a benevolent maneuver.) Direct sales was presented as a way of taking ownership of one’s fortunes, a fashionable spin on a precarious livelihood made possible by the amalgamation of two quasi-scientific movements: the pedagogy of salesmanship, and the doctrine of positive thinking as mind cure, which promoted ideas about individuals’ ability to manifest the good life for themselves. These converging programs were espoused by, among others, an unexceptional talent named Dale Carnegie, who changed the spelling of his name to suggest affinity with the steel magnate before authoring the 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” and Napoleon Hill, a fraudster whose 1937 book, “Think and Grow Rich,” attributed the source of the wealthy’s wealth to what we might today call good vibes.
Unlike Stanley’s profits, the influence of Carnegie et al. on the company’s honchos did trickle down. Dealers like Mary Kay were meant to think of themselves as being on a perpetual climb toward self-determination. Mary Kay, ever the A student, memorized self-improvement literature and company aphorisms, delivered in sermonic lessons such as “A Program of Self-Analysis,” which instructed sellers to inquire of themselves, “What’s the matter with me?” and “What’s holding me back?” Sloganeering was the lingua franca of what adherents referred to as the Stanley Opportunity. Gatherings, whether the yearly “pilgrimages” to the expansive Stanley Park headquarters in Westfield, Massachusetts, or the weekly (and mandatory) sales meetings among local dealers, were affirming sing-alongs, aimed at curating that feeling that we would now, with some skepticism, call “community.” Every touchpoint with the company gave Mary Kay the sense of a mission that was, Gavenas writes, “not about peddling toilet bowl brushes and E-Z Cleaner but about improving yourself and serving your fellow man.”
This gospel was not unique. The Stanley Opportunity touted but one brand of “evangelical capitalism,” Gavenas explains, “that all but ignored product information, minimized the mechanics of selling, and failed to mention monetary reward or other quantifiable goals.” As the nation steered into wartime and beyond, innumerable new companies would spring up and tailor their own version of the good word. Their products, supplements and cleaning supplies and cosmetics, inspired near-synonymous claims about health, beauty, and happiness. But, of course, the ultimate sell, the one that would carry such businesses and their offshoots through feast and especially famine, was the optimism of opportunity itself, a shot at the good life in crazy times, for sellers and customers both. And, as Mary Kay would find, the real U.S. dollars are reaped in making those parties one and the same.
Throughout the forties and fifties, Mary Kay inhaled Stanley as a life force. She got the hundred-plus product line down pat. She booked anywhere between one and four parties a day, regaling housewives with demonstrations and prizes she paid for herself (along with samples, transportation, and child care). She smilingly tilted her head and perfected pushiness without the verboten hard sell, adopting a “girlish” concern in reminding her hostess “of the social consequences of reneging.” She sang the benefits of selling, emphasizing the wife- and mother-friendly flexibility of the gig, leaving off its unrewarded drudgery. She attended sales meetings and rallies and trekked to Westfield yearly. She won the coveted title of Queen of Sales—she did not, however, receive the coveted alligator bag. The area manager had swapped the prize, one version of the story went. The disappointment did not stop Mary Kay from marrying the manager, who was also her boss, in 1946, the year after divorcing her first husband.
The lucky and smitten man was C. B. Eckman, at fifty-five, a grandfather next to his twenty-eight-year-old bride (also a literal grandfather), with the physique and health issues to match, though he at least had a good job, as a salaried leader within the Stanley organization. Ensconced in the moneyed neighborhood of Maple Springs, Mary Kay, by then a mother of three, could hire Black help, freeing more time for Stanley and, as she spun it, better homemaking. “Being a working mother helped me to remember my priorities,” she would later say. “God first, family second, career third.” Her selling and recruiting were enhanced by her new situation, her attire zhuzhed with hats and fur. She attended Stanley-sponsored affairs on her husband’s arm, which sufficed for the sales-minded couple’s date nights. When he died of a heart attack in 1947, just shy of a year into their marriage, Mary Kay filed the will the next morning, though it was a year before the estate was discharged to her. Even then, with enough Stanley stock to be “comfortable,” her hustle did not stop.
Eckman is one of several husbands who disappeared in the recruitment parable the entrepreneuse made out of her life story. And fair enough—call it a woman’s prerogative to strike her men from the record. In 1952, Mary Kay left Stanley and opened territories across the U.S. for a home-décor outfit named World Gift. After her first year, her region accounted for more than half of the company’s business. She was taking home a thousand dollars a month and was soon made national training director. Along with her fourth husband, Charles Weaver, Mary Kay moved into a modern home on easy street—Houston’s Glenbrook Valley—and bought a Cadillac. (She kept both the home and the car after their divorce, in 1960.) She was finally made to pause when a hemifacial spasm landed her on the operating table for brain surgery. That got her into wearing wigs.
In direct selling, it’s common for disgruntled talent to spin off into their own show. The products among these companies are not too unique for replication—the sell is what matters. And then there is something about the model, with profits and benefits siphoned upward, that inclines a dissatisfied person toward working harder for the promised reward; those who become skeptical, however, might see something rotten in the system and want to change it or believe that they should top the pile themselves. For Mary Kay, the latter of these rationales seems to have been clothed in the guise of the former, though the precise catalyst for establishing her own outfit remains indeterminate. According to one version of the story (a motivating hit during seventies-era recruiting for Mary Kay), she decided to leave World Gift after training a young man to be her superior in a position that had been denied to her. Gavenas, however, argues that the promotion was not at issue, but, rather, World Gift’s plan to copy the franchise model of a supplement company called Nutri-Bio, which operated according to what we would today understand to be a multilevel-marketing scheme. Mary Kay’s opposition to the scheme, if true, would be ironic, considering she was already engaged to a former national field director of Nutri-Bio, George Hallenbeck, who was laying plans for her to launch a cosmetics line in its image. (“Hallenbeck,” Gavenas writes, “represented multilevel marketing at its most grandiose.”)
Hallenbeck—husband No. 5—died of a heart attack a month before Mary Kay Cosmetics was set to commence. Mary Kay pressed on, undeterred, and the company opened its doors on Friday, September 13, 1963, organized according to some version of what M.L.M. originators had dubbed the Plan. Mary Kay consultants hosted parties called beauty shows, promoting Mary Kay not merely as a series of products but as a life style activated by sharing—selling—the good word of Mary Kay. In terms of earnings, this latter messaging was crucial; as Mary Kay’s son and the company’s C.E.O., Richard Rogers, continually stressed, a consultant’s earnings would multiply as her recruits did. (One of Mary Kay’s first recruits would later write an exposé claiming that Rogers once divulged that “the real money” in Mary Kay was in recruiting, not makeup.) A consultant was, and is, urged to think of herself as a business, setting up a shop of recruits whose purchased inventory will boost her status in the eyes of the company, reflected in bonuses and sartorial milestones. (Beauty consultants who recruit at least three active distributors to their “downline” earn the honor of attiring themselves in matching red blazers; about six per cent achieve this preliminary level of status.) “Consultant,” as Read points out in “Little Bosses Everywhere,” became one of those “corporate sales-inflected euphemisms” within M.L.M.s—as did “sales.” In the world of Mary Kay, “sales” has always been an accounting of product purchased by its own sellers. How many “real customers” have ever purchased from Mary Kay? “No one actually knows,” Read writes.
Gavenas occasionally veers from hagiography, usually in the form of small, critical quips, but does not linger on the uncertainty of Mary Kay’s sale numbers. She instead enumerates the accoutrements and evidence of a feminine empire—the famous pink Cadillacs awarded to top saleswomen during Seminar, a rapturous yearly conference, populated with skirted, wig-wearing acolytes—and details the company’s immense earnings, from a reported fifty-four million dollars in sales (to its own sellers) in 1978 to a hundred and sixty-seven million in 1980. “To women who had been unlucky for most of their lives, Mary Kay offered a dream that had nothing to do with rescue by a knight in shining armor, strokes of good fortune, or accidents of birth,” Gavenas writes. The fantasy the company offers has been sustained well past its founder’s death, in 2001.
But, as the years and the profits of the company amass, how are the actual women who are working for themselves, for the company, faring? There are currently more than 2.4 million Mary Kay independent sales representatives worldwide. Gavenas cites a 1993 case study—revised in 2009—that found that consultants earn an average twenty-four hundred dollars a year. In Canada, where, unlike in the U.S., M.L.M.s are required to disclose these figures, Mary Kay consultants averaged two hundred and eleven Canadian dollars (around a hundred and fifty U.S. dollars) of annual commission in 2023. None of this accounts for what women lose—the money sunk into recruitment, into trips and parties, into child care, and into all that unsold product. In her book, Read interviews a woman named Monique who “was sitting in a room in her house . . . surrounded by Mary Kay products, boxes arranged in precarious stacks in her closets and along her walls like the skyline of a pink cardboard city.” Monique had spent a decade and seventy-five thousand dollars on Mary Kay, earning an estimated five thousand total—at best—for that trouble. “She couldn’t even use the makeup herself anymore. It had started to give her hives, her face breaking out in red splotches when anything Mary Kay hit her skin.”
The ubiquity of the Mary Kay name begets a strange opacity. Aside from SKUs, Seminar, and pink Cadillacs—what is the product? The name Mary Kay has always struck me as matronly; in the hours of beauty influencing I have ardently or inadvertently consumed, not once have any of its products received mention. Not once have I complimented a girlfriend or stranger on their beat and heard that name returned. I can only interpret this as indicative of the line’s use, or lack thereof.
Gavenas’s final chapter accelerates into the internet age and the subsequent backlash against Mary Kay, once consultants and former consultants could exchange notes at a rapid pace. These women are gadflies to Gavenas, who doesn’t take their efforts to organize against the company seriously, writing that “backlash or no, direct selling wasn’t going anywhere.” Companies modelled after Mary Kay that have reprised empowerment babble for their founders’ gain are mentioned but receive scarce judgment. (Name-checked: LuLaRoe; not name-checked: the 2021 exposé docuseries “LuLaRich.”) In the acknowledgments, Gavenas writes that she is “neither pro nor con” on the topic of multilevel marketing. But don’t we know by now that neutrality on the topic of empire, even one drenched in pink, amounts to endorsement? “As the company celebrated its sixtieth year,” in 2023, “women in the U.S. averaged eighty-two cents for every dollar earned by men,” Gavenas concludes. What an inculpatory linking of clauses. ♦