Leonard Lauder, former CEO of Estée Lauder, has passed away at the age of 92.
The Estée Lauder Companies released a statement on Sunday, June 15, saying that Leonard passed away on Saturday, June 14, surrounded by his family. Leonard was also a well-known art collector and philanthropist.
The statement read: “Mr. Lauder was a truly visionary and fearless leader and a cherished friend to many. He was a beacon for our company and a north star for the entire industry. The world is a better place because of Leonard Lauder.”
Leonard is the eldest son of Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder, who officially founded Estée Lauder Companies in 1946. Leonard joined the company in 1958 and served as CEO for many years. His first wife, the late Evelyn Lauder, was the co-founder of the Pink Breast Cancer Ribbon.
He was born in New York City in 1933. Her mother’s real name was Josephine Esther Mentzer and her father’s real name was Joseph Lauter.
Estée Lauder’s career was helped by her uncle, a salesman who sold beauty products. Estée Lauder and Joseph changed their names to promote the Estée Lauder brand.
“My mother was different from other mothers,” Leonard wrote in his 2020 memoir, The Friends I Made: My Beautiful Life (excerpted by CBS).
“Growing up in the 1930s, I remember sitting in the kitchen and watching my mother boil face cream on the stove.”
While he and his brother Ronald had lunch and did homework, some women would come to their apartment for facials and buy products.
Leonard graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and then completed undergraduate studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 as a lieutenant.
After retiring, he joined Estée Lauder. According to the company’s website, Leonard was initially unsure if he wanted to join the company and considered returning to the Navy for full-time work. But he ultimately decided to join and served as the company’s president from 1972 to 1995.
In 1982, he became CEO and served in that position until 1999. In 1995, he became chairman and was promoted to chairman emeritus in 2009. Leonard is also known as the company’s chief education officer.
Under Leonard’s leadership, Estée Lauder successfully transformed into the global company it is today. He created Estée Lauder’s first research and development laboratory and began acquiring other companies in the 1990s, including MAC, Bobbi Brown and Aveda.
According to Forbes, in December 2024, Leonard’s wealth reached $10.8 billion, ranking him as the 234th richest person in the world.
Leonard married Evelyn Hausner in 1959 and has two sons, William and Gary Lauder. Evelyn was a teacher when she married Leonard, and later became a senior vice president at Estée Lauder and founded the Clinique line.
She also led the company’s biggest social issue, breast cancer awareness, and helped create the pink ribbon that is now ubiquitous. Leonard and Evelyn worked with Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, helping it establish the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center.
Leonard and his brother Ronald co-founded the Alzheimer’s Drug Development Foundation in 1998, which has awarded more than $209 million to fund clinical trials in 19 countries, according to Forbes.
Leonard also had a passion for visual art and was a major collector. He wrote in his memoir excerpted by Art News that his love of collecting began with postcards, and he eventually amassed more than 125,000 vintage postcards. After that, he began collecting posters and eventually turned to art.
He wrote: “I had been interested in modern art since elementary school. I was obsessed with movies, and two or three times a week I would take the subway alone – children were very free in those days – to the Museum of Modern Art to watch classic films.
If I arrived early or had time after the movie, I would wander the exhibition halls. I had not yet been exposed to Cubism, but I experienced the great satisfaction of savoring a painting again and again and making it ‘my own’.”
He donated part of his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Newberry Library, and served as director and chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In April 2013, he pledged to donate 81 Cubist works of art from his collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The New York Times called the move “an outstanding act of philanthropy.”
Evelyn died in 2011. Leonard married Judy Ellis Glickman in 2015. Like Leonard, Glickman also lost a loved one after more than 50 years of marriage.
“We were lucky that the end and the beginning of a new chapter in our lives coincided,” Leonard told The New York Times in 2015.
In 2020, he looked back on his life and asked himself if he had any regrets, telling Brunswick Group: “I can’t think of anything that I really regret. Now, could I have done better? Of course.
You can always keep trying to do better. But do I regret anything? At least not.”