Texas make-up tycoon Mary Kay (Wagner) Ash (born ca. 1916) parlayed her early training in direct sales into a multi-million-dollar, Dallas-based cosmetics firm.

Although her choice of a cosmetics career was not unique, Mary Kay Ash proved incomparable at combining the skills she had acquired selling books door-to-door with her understanding of marketing to women. Successful beauty product entrepreneurs before her had proved this a lucrative field for women. A few, such as Madame C.J. Walker, Elizabeth Arden, and Helena Rubenstein, had "invented" a specialized product line and established highly effective sales networks. It was Mary Kay's reliance on women as in-home salespersons, her use of a signature color--pink--as part of the corporate identity, and her shrewd incorporation of premiums and incentives (such as pink Cadillacs and diamond jewelry) into company sales plans that brought her such astonishing financial success.

Clinging to the rather time-worn convention that "a...