“We aren’t going to make Russian women beautiful, we are going to keep them beautiful,” Estée Lauder said over a microphone on Nov. 16, 1989, at the inauguration of her eponymous company’s first store in the Soviet Union, just a few blocks from Moscow’s Red Square.

The outdoor temperature might have registered as freezing, but the crowd of onlookers sizzled with excitement. This was the first freestanding boutique in which Russian women could buy Western cosmetics with rubles, an important step in the Estée Lauder Cos.’ international expansion.

That push began in 1960 with the Estée Lauder brand’s launch in Holt Renfrew in Toronto. Soon after, it hit Harrods in London and then Puerto Rico. That decade saw other international debuts, including Sweden, Hong Kong, Australia, France and Japan — places that would enhance the awareness and international visibility of the brand — all by 1968.

In 1973, business contracts were started in the then-Soviet Union, where Lauder products became available in hard-currency shops. Four years after the Moscow shop, the company opened doors of an Estée Lauder Perfumery in Warsaw.

Other key years included 1993, when the group entered China with corners for the Estée Lauder and Clinique brands at the Isetan department store in Shanghai. That helped set the expansion in the country, and elsewhere in Asia, in motion. The next year, the group unveiled its first freestanding store in Prague.

Global reach expanded through other means, too. , such as MAC Cosmetics, with a minority stake in the Canada-based makeup brand in 1994, followed by a full-out acquisition in 1998; the purchase of Jo Malone London in 1999, and the acquisition of Darphin in France in the early 2000s.

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