“The effect of scent is really interesting. It can create a mood and change a feeling immediately. I wanted to create a modern wardrobe of fragrances … fragrances that can be very personal to the woman who’s wearing them.”

I’m natural, but I wear makeup seven days a week.

When you ask women what’s the one thing they wish they had more of, they always say time.

As a girl, my favorite toy was my dollhouse; if I could still play with it now, I would! I used to love a well-arranged room: the furniture, the fabric, the lighting.

People always ask what I would have done if I weren’t doing what I’m doing. And I say I’d [still] be in fashion or in beauty. It’s such a dream come true now because I have the ability to go into home [goods] and accessories as well.

I love Pilates, I really do, and I do it three times a week because it works well for me.

I figure if I take my children’s work seriously, maybe they will too. And it reinforces the idea that art is not something alien and esoteric. Anyone can make art.

And balancing motherhood and career makes you both a better mother and a better businesswoman.

I’ve always loved the beauty world. Ever since I was a child, I looked at magazines and wore fragrances and tried out samples and sets. I worked at Clinique in the creative department for a summer during high school. And when I graduated from university,

I discovered I was passionate about the creative process, the product development, creating a concept around a fragrance or lipstick.

Beauty is my heritage and my core. But my passion is design for the spaces where we live and work.

You always have to stay true to yourself.

I love market research because you really have an idea of what your consumers are looking for.

I think talented people are priceless. And I think people that are knowledgeable and experienced – and I think there’s a balance of new talent and experience, which makes, I think, Estee Lauder really special.

There’s something really interesting about that as a trend, that whole idea of lifestyle and being happy in your surroundings.

My mom has always been kind of my backbone. She keeps me strong. She is a mother, a friend. She is really everything to me.

It can be a walk on the beach, it could be a kiss from your child,or it could be a beautiful picture frame, a special fragrance. I think luxury doesn’t necessarily have to mean expensive.

If something doesn’t work, it becomes obvious immediately. This just isn’t going to work.

The minute somebody joins a committee… they immediately suffer from committee brain. They become wildly over-enthusiastic, over-optimistic, over-pessimistic. Committees turn people into idiots, and politics is a committee.

Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground.

If my tears spilled spontaneously at that moment it’s because I immediately understood that what was happening, like in a dream, was the treat you had prepared for me I felt your friendship much stronger than if you had thanked me a million times that what pleased and touched me.

If you have any image of what the Truth is, slay it immediately because that’s not it.

If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world.

Immediately, that gives you creative license to really recreate and explore and put a new stamp on the genre.