A child of Vienna
Evelyn Hausner was born on August 12, 1936, in Vienna, the only child of Ernest and Mimi Hausner. Her father’s family came from Skala, a small town in Galicia with a large Jewish community, where her grandfather Zalman Hausner kept a general store and was remembered as an Orthodox Jew of deep piety. Ernest had lived in Poland and Berlin before settling in Vienna, where he married Mimi Segal, the daughter of a Viennese lumber supplier, and ran a lingerie shop.
That settled life ended when Evelyn was not yet two. In March 1938 Nazi Germany annexed Austria, and Vienna’s Jews were stripped of their rights, their property and their safety almost overnight. The Hausners left with a few belongings, among them the household silver, which Ernest used to obtain visas to Belgium. Several of his relatives who stayed behind in Europe were later murdered in the Holocaust.
Refugee years and a new start in New York
From Belgium the family reached England. There Evelyn’s mother was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, and her father placed the little girl in a nursery until he could raise money and secure his wife’s release. Decades later Lauder still described the separation as very traumatic. In 1940 the family sailed for New York. She liked to recall that her mother woke her as the ship came into the harbour so that she could see the Statue of Liberty.
In New York her father worked as a diamond cutter during the war. In 1947 her parents bought a dress shop in Manhattan called Lamay and gradually built it into a chain of five shops. Evelyn grew up on West 86th Street, attended Public School 9 and then Hunter College High School, and went on to Hunter College, the city’s tuition-free public college, where she studied psychology and anthropology and graduated in 1958. She later said that growing up with a working mother made it impossible for her to imagine staying at home, and that a childhood like hers had made her tougher than most people she met.
Marriage and the family business
In her first year at Hunter she was set up on a blind date with Leonard Lauder, the elder son of the cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder. He was, she said, the first person who ever took her out to dinner in a restaurant. They married on July 5, 1959, at the Plaza Hotel, and remained together for 52 years. They had two sons, William and Gary.
Before joining the family firm she taught for several years in public schools in Harlem. When she joined Estée Lauder it was still a small business with a handful of products and employees, and she pitched in wherever she was needed: creating training programmes, directing new products and marketing, and playing a central part in launching the Clinique skin-care line in 1968, whose name she chose. By 1989 she was senior corporate vice president and head of fragrance development worldwide, a post she held until her death. Her business career gave her two things that would matter enormously later: a deep knowledge of how to reach women where they shopped, and a family fortune and network that could be put to work for a cause.
A disease no one talked about
Lauder traced her breast cancer work to a meeting of the cosmetics industry’s trade association in 1988, where she saw a film about Look Good Feel Better, a programme that taught women undergoing chemotherapy how to cope with hair loss and skin changes. When the film ended, she said, there was not a dry eye in the room. She began asking questions and learned that about 44,000 American women were dying of breast cancer every year, roughly twice the number then dying of AIDS. AIDS activists, she noticed, were telling their stories and campaigning loudly for new drugs. Women with breast cancer, by contrast, were suffering in silence, often ashamed to name their illness.
In 1989 she was herself diagnosed with breast cancer. She almost never discussed her own case in public, telling a reporter in 1995 that her situation did not really matter. What mattered to her was that the disease was underfunded, poorly understood and surrounded by stigma, and she set out to change all three. She began by asking friends who edited beauty and health magazines to run stories on breast health, and she joined the Board of Overseers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
The Breast Center and the pink ribbon
At Memorial Sloan-Kettering she agreed to lead a fundraising drive, launched in 1989, for a dedicated breast diagnostic and treatment centre. She ultimately helped raise about $18 million. The Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center opened on East 64th Street in 1992 as a dedicated place for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, and it quickly became a model for similar centres around the world. In September 2009 the programme moved into a new building three times the size, nine floors and about 150,000 square feet, paid for in part by her husband, with diagnostics, surgical consultation, oncology and psychological counselling together under one roof.
In 1992 Alexandra Penney, editor of SELF magazine, was preparing the magazine’s second annual Breast Cancer Awareness Month issue and wanted a symbol. The year before, a breast cancer survivor named Charlotte Haley had attached peach-coloured ribbons to cards protesting how little of the National Cancer Institute’s budget went to prevention. Penney and Lauder settled on a pink ribbon. Lauder put the full reach of Estée Lauder behind it: in October 1992 the company launched its Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign, and women at the brand’s cosmetics counters across the United States were handed pink ribbons as a reminder to have breast examinations. Some shoppers at first assumed it was an AIDS ribbon. The pink ribbon soon became a worldwide symbol of breast health. By 2011 the campaign had given out more than 115 million ribbons, and from 2000 it began lighting famous landmarks in pink each October.
Building a research foundation
Awareness alone, Lauder believed, would not save lives. What was missing was steady money for the scientists trying to understand and cure the disease. Sitting at her kitchen table with her friend Dr. Larry Norton, a leading breast cancer physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, she planned a foundation devoted entirely to breast cancer research. The Breast Cancer Research Foundation was born in August 1993. A scientific advisory board chose which projects to fund, while a separate board raised money, so that grants went to the most promising researchers wherever they worked.
The start was modest. In its first fiscal year, ending in June 1994, the foundation raised just over $600,000 and supported eight researchers. The next year it raised nearly $2 million, then nearly $4 million, then $6 million. Lauder recruited partners far beyond the beauty business, from department stores and fashion houses to an airline that painted a plane pink. By her death in 2011 it had raised more than $350 million and was supporting about 186 scientists around the world. The foundation has since raised more than a billion dollars, and for 2025–2026 it awarded $74.75 million in grants to more than 260 scientists in 17 countries, with about a third of its annual funding going to research on metastatic, or stage 4, breast cancer. It describes itself as the largest private funder of breast cancer research in the world.
How women benefit today
The change Lauder helped bring about is easy to forget because it is now everywhere. When she began, breast cancer was rarely discussed in magazines, on television or at the dinner table. Today October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month around the world, pink ribbons appear on everything from postage stamps to sports uniforms, and women are routinely reminded to examine themselves and to have mammograms. Earlier detection, combined with better treatments, has helped death rates from breast cancer in the United States fall substantially since the early 1990s.
The research her foundation pays for reaches patients through clinical trials, new targeted and hormone therapies, studies of inherited risk, and work on stopping the disease from spreading. Her name is also carried by the Sloan-Kettering breast centre, where women are screened, diagnosed and treated every day. The pink ribbon has its critics: some activists object that companies use it to sell products while giving little to research, a practice they call pinkwashing. Lauder’s own model, though, tied the symbol directly to a research foundation, and it was that pairing of public awareness with serious science that made her contribution lasting.
Jewish roots and private life
Lauder’s life was shaped from the start by the fate of Europe’s Jews. She was born into a Jewish family with roots in the shtetl world of Galicia, she escaped Vienna as a toddler only because her father traded the family silver for visas, and relatives who could not leave died in the Holocaust. In New York her father stayed close to his old community through the Skala Benevolent Society, one of the many mutual aid societies founded by Jewish immigrants from the same town. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency marked her death as the passing of a refugee from Vienna who became a pioneer of the pink ribbon, and her funeral was held at Central Synagogue in Manhattan.
Outside work she was an accomplished photographer whose pictures were exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and Galeries Lafayette in Paris; she published two books of photographs, The Seasons Observed and An Eye for Beauty, and in 2006 a cookbook of healthy recipes, In Great Taste. Despite a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and a home in Colorado, she and her husband liked to retreat to a plain cabin in Putnam County, New York, where she might cook German food for guests.
Last years and legacy
In 2007 Lauder was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, unrelated to her earlier breast cancer and not of the inherited kind. She kept working. In 2010 she told an interviewer that she did not want to spend time looking back at what she had done, only to keep going, and that she wanted to reach the point where her foundation could go out of business because cancer had been cured. Among her honours were France’s Legion of Honour in 2002, the Double Helix Medal of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 2010 and, with her family, the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2011.
She died of complications of ovarian cancer at her home in Manhattan on November 12, 2011, at the age of 75. On the day of her funeral the Empire State Building was lit pink in her memory, and the United States Senate passed a resolution honouring her life. The little girl who had watched the Statue of Liberty rise out of New York Harbor as a refugee had given her adopted country, and the world, a symbol that taught millions of women to take their health seriously and a foundation that keeps paying for the science that may one day end the disease.
Sources & further reading
Evelyn H. Lauder, champion of breast cancer research, dies at 75 (New York Times obituary by Cathy Horyn, reprinted in the Congressional Record, February 2, 2012, p. S321) · Evelyn Lauder, breast cancer’s pink ribbon pioneer, dies at 75, Jewish Telegraphic Agency · An Interview with Evelyn H. Lauder, LEADERS magazine, 2010 · 12 Facts About Our Founder, Evelyn H. Lauder, Breast Cancer Research Foundation · The Family of Zalman Hausner, Skala KehilaLinks, JewishGen · Evelyn Lauder, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.