A Rodin Masterpiece: Reluctant businesswoman Linda Rodin's beauty empire focuses on the artisinal and the power of a good story

Through her kitchen window in one of the last remaining Art Deco buildings in Manhattan’s Chelsea, Linda Rodin can see directly through to the jewellery department of the newly reopened downtown Barneys on 7th Avenue. “ It takes window shopping to a whole new level”, she jokes. Having lived in the same place for thirty-five years she remembers the department store the first time round, when it opened its doors in the early Eighties. “It was this incredible space and when it closed it was very sad”, she continues. “But now it’s back. It’s different, of course - you can’t go back in time - but it’s here and I sell my products here. And it’s lovely.”

Those products are simply labelled Rodin, a cult beauty brand whose range runs the gamut from fragrance, to lipstick, to lip-balm and even candles. The star product, however, is the lynchpin, founding item – and still a best-seller. It’s Rodin Olio Lusso, a luxurious face oil that may well be responsible for a oil-based craze that has recently shaken up the beauty industry.

Rodin herself makes no such claim - in fact she remained completely unaware of it until a visit to an editor’s desk, two years into her brand, revealed a line-up of fifteen similar products. “I said, ‘what are those?’ And they said, ‘have you been living under a rock? Everybody has a face oil.’ I wasn’t even aware of it!” She shrugs, magnanimous. “Well, good. It’s a great thing to use.” Rodin’s is an exceedingly great thing to use. Estee Lauder would know; they acquired Rodin Olio Lusso a year and a half ago – quite the achievement for a reluctant businesswoman who started mixing the oil just for herself in her bathroom. It’s funny how short the distance from said bathroom to the Barneys shopping floor proved.

Rodin is 68. She heads a beauty empire, and is suitably beautiful, looking at least a decade younger than her age on paper, if you care about stuff like that. Birdlike, with brilliant silver hair, usually tousled in a braid, bright lipstick and nails and big bug-eye glasses (she got her prescription lenses fitted in a dozen frames including one that Morgenthal Frederics made for Jackie O), she’s perennially denim-clad. Today she’s in new super wide Chloe jeans although she lives in her old Levi’s – “$25 at flea markets.” Her stylishness betrays her former career incarnation – before Rodin started making her face oil nine years ago, she was a freelance stylist for thirty years, from Italian Vogue editorials to campaigns for Victoria’s Secret - and rather serendipitously for Estee Lauder too. She founded her own store in Soho in the late seventies, followed by stints as a stylist and buyer for New York store Henri Bendel during its glory years. (“Bendel’s when it was fantastic: around 1982, was the most incredible place on earth!”) and as an editor at Harper’s Bazaar (“I was there for less than a year, it wasn’t for me.”). Her fruitful freelance career saw her pull together looks for individuals whose aesthetics are as far apart as Bob Dylan and Madonna.

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But where did Beauty come in? “What makes it interesting is I was aware of beauty products only because I was in the fashion business,” states Rodin. With a first row seat to every great make-up artist during her career of fashion shoots, Rodin watched closely. “I was never interested in products in my life, we would wash our face with soap and water and just wore lipstick and mascara. But I saw every product that came out and I watched all these beauties get made up. And I think what led to my products is that I tried everything and I never liked anything. So I made my own at home.”

While in Italy, Rodin had an epiphany. “I always collected little bottles of oils – in Morocco I bought Argan oil twenty years ago, in South Africa I discovered calendula oil, so I thought of mixing them all together. When I got back, I did it in my bathroom in a teacup.” The thought of making it into a business never crossed her mind. Instead she’d bottle her mix and give it to friends and the models backstage. “It’s nothing I would have ever thought of until my nephew came to town one day and asked where was I selling it and how much for, and what was the formula. I said, ‘I give it away and the formula I know by eye’.” So out they went to buy beakers for measuring and the formula remains the same today. Well, almost. “It’s tweaked every time,” reasons Rodin. “I’m there for every fresh batch - because it varies like a good wine, it’s a vintage. One year it might be wetter or the jasmine might be a little sweeter in one batch and the neroli might be a little stronger. So it’s trying to always reach that golden ratio where it’s as perfect as it can be, knowing that it’s grown in different climates. That’s a little variable which makes it nice to me because it’s never 100% the same but it’s always something that I love. That’s the artisanal part of it but it’s also scary – what if the crop is really not great or it’s slow but it’s all you can do, it’s nature!”

With Estee Lauder behind her now, it makes dealing with mother nature that little bit easier. “Now we project further ahead so we don’t run into these troubles,” Rodin says. “But when I was doing it myself I didn’t know I was going to make 5000 more bottles, I was only making five!”

Like the female beauty entrepreneurs before her – including Estee herself, Rodin knows the power of a good story - but she’s also always been drawn to those anyway. Her magpie’s heaven of an apartment is full of old photographs and flea market finds, corals and seashells and all things blue. She has an extensive film archive that she always dives into for inspiration. They’ve helped both name and colour a line of lipsticks currently in the works, due to be released in the UK in June - one, a true red, is dubbed Red Hedy after Hedy Lamarr – “she was brilliant and beautiful, brains and beauty and I have pictures of her wearing that colour.” Others are closer to home: a hot pink one is called Winks after her poodle Winky; an orange is called Tough Tomato “because I say I am one.”

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Rodin is as clear and direct about life as she is about aging, and New York today (“it’s been going downhill since the mid-Eighties”). “I think you can only do the best you can. You get older and you get wiser and more defined in who you are. That’s one thing that age does, it also makes you look like an old lady”, she laughs, “but I would never change it. Five years ago I did try filler injections and one day I looked in the mirror and thought, who is this person? And that was it.” After a lifetime of sun exposure – “I sat at the beach my entire life, I was so brown and I love the ocean, the water but it ruined my skin. But you know what? I had the best time of my life”, she now wears sunscreen but says it’s too late. There’s one Rodin concoction you might not want to try: baby oil, iodine and Coca Cola. “We’d make this mixture just to get the colour and we’d put it on and lie in the sun for hours!” She abstains from pop culture save for a two-day Netflix binge of House of Cards, “I couldn’t put it down!” - she didn’t like Downton Abbey – “to me it was a remake of Brideshead, which was the real deal, it changed all of our lives. Downton to me is so sharp, I almost feel that I know where they bought the lace to make that dress, where they got those flowers.” She heard a catchy tune at a store one day and was informed by the girl there that it’s Rihanna “like, duh!”, her music taste stops sometime in the Seventies, literature in the Eighties.

And yet, Rodin is the youngest person you’ll ever meet. She starts telling me about feeling invisible after a certain age, “I was never afraid to get old but now you’re not allowed to be old. It’s like seeing a fresh apple over a time lapse get wrinkled, sometimes it’s more beautiful. But I would be lying if I said I like my wrinkles…” when a young guy stops and compliments her on her outfit. She thanks him and hails down a cab while finishing her trail of thought, “…but it’s life!”