One Lodge, Six Charters / City Lodge No. 408
A past master of City Lodge, Otto Cohen appears to have been the cosmetics executive who helped build Lady Esther and Charles of the Ritz and made custom-blended face powder a department-store ritual.
Research note: This article provisionally identifies City Lodge’s R.W. Otto Cohen with cosmetics executive Otto J. Cohen (1888–1979). Confirmation from lodge or Grand Lodge records is still needed; the distinction is discussed in the source notes below.
In the closing months of 1950, the outgoing Master of City Lodge No. 408 used his last column in the lodge notice to thank the past masters who had turned out for the previous meeting, and to send a word to two who could not. Right Worshipful Otto Cohen and Right Worshipful Henry Scheibel, he wrote, had been kept home by their health, but the brethren were thinking of them. To the lodge, Otto Cohen was a past master, one of the senior men whose names anchored its roll. If the identification followed here is correct, he was also the cosmetics executive whose work helped millions of American women find face powder that matched their skin.
A Family in the Beauty Business
Otto Cohen was born in 1888 into a large Jewish family whose members went by two surnames: some used their father’s name, Cohen, and others their mother’s maiden name, Busiel. In 1913 his sister Syma began selling face cream and powder door to door in Chicago under the name Lady Esther. The family included a sister named Esther, although the origin of the company name is uncertain. The family enterprise became the Lady Esther Company, and its first president was Otto.
Lady Esther grew from the doorstep to the drugstore and eventually into one of the best-selling cosmetics brands in America, famous for its Four-Purpose Face Cream and a face powder whose ads would later boast of being blown smooth by “twin hurricanes.” By the time the radio age made it a household name, Otto had moved on. In 1925 he sold his stake to the family, Syma took over as president, and he turned his attention to New York.
The Salon at the Ritz-Carlton
New York had something Chicago did not: the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Madison Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and in it a ladies’ hairdressing salon that had passed in 1919 to an Alsatian-born coiffeur named Charles Jundt. In 1926 Jundt began selling rouge and face powder under a name that borrowed the hotel’s glamour, Charles of the Ritz. Perfumes followed in 1927, three of them, called simply A, B and C.
That same year Otto Cohen joined the company as a vice president, bringing a working knowledge of cosmetics that few in the business could match. By 1928 Charles of the Ritz had eleven salons, in the Ritz-Carlton, the Plaza, the Barclay and the Ritz Tower in New York and in Ritz-Carlton hotels from Atlantic City to Boston to Boca Raton, and it launched a full line of cosmetics with an advertising campaign said to cost a quarter of a million dollars.
Powder Made to Measure
Otto’s lasting contribution was an idea that sounds obvious today and was nothing of the kind in the 1920s. Most face powders came in a handful of shades, often just white, flesh and brunette. Charles of the Ritz offered something better. At its powder bars, a trained “powder colorist” studied a customer’s complexion, mixed a shade to suit it, and recorded the formula so that it could be blended again whenever she ran low. Otto is credited with developing this Individual Powder Blending Service, taking it beyond the hotel salons and into the great department stores, and training the sales staff who ran it.
The service became the brand’s signature. Advertisers even sold empty, gift-wrapped powder boxes, many of them pitched at husbands and sweethearts, which the lucky recipient could carry to the nearest powder bar to have filled with her own shade. Competitors copied the idea, but for decades the phrase “Charles of the Ritz” meant a powder blended just for you.
Otto is also credited with developing the company’s flagship skin cream, Rejuvenescence. The name proved a little too optimistic for the Federal Trade Commission, which objected to the claims made for it in 1938. The cream lived on under a gentler name, Revenescence, and generations of loyal customers swore by it.
A Name on Every Vanity
The company Otto helped build kept growing long after its founding years. In 1935 it introduced Jean Naté, the bracing lemony splash that sat on countless bathroom shelves for the rest of the century. In the 1960s Charles of the Ritz took on the perfumes and cosmetics of a young designer named Yves Saint Laurent and merged with the house of Lanvin. In 1978 it gave the world Enjoli, sold on television as the “eight hour perfume for the 24-hour woman,” with a jingle borrowed from a Peggy Lee hit that anyone who watched television in those years can probably still hum.
Ownership passed to E. R. Squibb in 1971, to Yves Saint Laurent in 1986 and to Revlon in 1987, which retired the Charles of the Ritz name in 2002. The powder bars are long gone. The memory of them is not, and online collectors and nostalgic daughters still trade stories of their first custom-blended compact.
In the East of City Lodge
City Lodge No. 408 had been meeting in Manhattan since 1856, and in the twentieth century it drew many of its members from the city’s Jewish business and professional community. Its Otto Cohen served as Master and was later addressed in lodge notices as Right Worshipful, although the specific Grand Lodge office or distinction behind that title has not yet been established. In his later years his home was in Queens.
The lodge of 1950 was a proud and slightly anxious institution, its notices full of life-membership certificates, relief-fund appeals and gentle scolding of past masters who had stopped coming to meetings. A man like Otto, who no longer attended only because his health would not allow it, was exactly the kind of brother the Master wanted to name. His name remained on the roll of past masters still living when City Lodge reached its centennial in 1956.
The cosmetics executive’s private life rarely made the papers. A 1942 photograph shows him on his honeymoon with his bride, Erna Mendelson; both had been married before. Like many New Yorkers of his generation, he eventually retired to the warmth of Miami Beach.
The Last Shade
Otto Cohen died at his home in Miami Beach in April 1979, at about ninety. The New York Times remembered him as one of the founders of Charles of the Ritz. By then Enjoli was playing on television, and a new generation had little idea that the company behind it had once won its customers one carefully blended shade of powder at a time.
City Lodge No. 408 remembered its Otto Cohen differently: as a past master who had sat in the East and remained on its rolls for decades. The lodge that once counted Judge Abram J. Dittenhoefer, Lincoln’s elector, among its founders, and the film man Joseph H. Nadel among its brothers, preserved another life in the brief language of its notices. If the identification is confirmed, those notices connect the old Manhattan lodge to a businessman who helped build a trade around one carefully matched shade at a time.
Endnotes and Sources
Lodge Records
- City Lodge No. 408, F. & A.M., lodge notice, late 1950, “East of the Altar” column (R.W. Otto Cohen and R.W. Henry Scheibel absent because of health).
- City Lodge No. 408 list of Masters, 1856–1956, with members living in 1956, as compiled by Brete Murphy (Otto Cohen, with a Queens address).
Newspapers
- “Otto Cohen, One of the Founders of Charles of Ritz,” The New York Times, April 27, 1979 (archive listing; full obituary should be consulted to confirm his exact age and other biographical details).
Cosmetics History and Online Sources
- Cosmetics and Skin: “Charles of the Ritz” — Otto J. Cohen’s role in the company, its salons, the Individual Powder Blending Service and Rejuvenescence.
- Cosmetics and Skin: “Charles of the Ritz (1936–1945)” — The company’s development after its founding period.
- Cosmetics and Skin: “Charles of the Ritz (post 1945)” — The company’s later products and development.
- Cosmetics and Skin: “Charles of the Ritz Powder Bars” — Custom blending, department-store powder bars and the customer experience.
- Cosmetics and Skin: “Lady Esther” — The Cohen-Busiel family, Syma’s business and Otto Cohen’s service as first president until 1925.
- Charles of the Ritz, Beauty in the Modern Mode (1932) — A period company booklet reproduced by Cosmetics and Skin.
- Wikipedia, “Charles of the Ritz,” “Lady Esther” and “Charles Jundt.”
- Lady Esther face powder advertisements in Radio and Television Mirror and Photoplay, 1940–1944, via the Lantern media history archive.
- JewishGen discussion posts on the Cohen-Busiel family and Charles of the Ritz.
A Note on the Sources
- This article provisionally identifies City Lodge’s R.W. Otto Cohen with Otto J. Cohen (1888–1979) of Lady Esther and Charles of the Ritz. The published sources on the cosmetics executive do not mention Masonic membership. The identification should be confirmed from lodge or Grand Lodge records through a middle initial, birth date, home address or another matching biographical detail.
- The years Otto Cohen served as Master of City Lodge, and the Grand Lodge office or distinction associated with his title Right Worshipful, are not given in the sources gathered for this article.
- His exact age at death should be checked against the full text of the 1979 New York Times obituary.
- The origin of the Lady Esther name is uncertain. The Cohen family included a sister named Esther, but Cosmetics and Skin suggests that the name may instead refer to the biblical Esther.
Continue the Story
City Lodge’s membership connected an old Manhattan lodge to law, entertainment and business. These related biographies explore two other lives preserved in its records.
- Brother Abram J. Dittenhoefer of City Lodge No. 408 — Meet the charter member and past master whose career connected Lincoln’s election, the courts and the American stage.
- Joseph H. Nadel of City Lodge No. 408: The New York Mason Who Kept Hollywood Running — Follow a City Lodge brother from New York’s movie studios to Hollywood.
Explore the Beauty-Business History
Read the history of Charles of the Ritz
Explore the Charles of the Ritz powder bars
