Woman who started face cream firm from makeshift lab eyes Nobel recognition
When Dr Irena Eris first started concocting face creams in a makeshift lab near Warsaw in 1983, she was taking a huge risk. Living in a communist state with a centrally planned economy, private enterprise was the preserve of regime-slurring traitors.
Yet Eris, then 33, knew Poles yearned for products they could not find on the bare shelves of state-owned stores. More than that, she knew Polish women would love to get hold of anything to make them look younger and prettier.
Having borrowed the equivalent of six Polski Fiats from her mother, stakes were high. She started small, writing her own recipes using the PhD in pharmaceuticals she had gained from East Berlin's Humboldt University.
Her husband turned salesman, zipping around Poland in his own tiny Fiat, trying to persuade brave shop owners to take a punt on the mysterious tubs of cream he had in the boot with his wife's maiden name on them.
Twenty-seven years later and Eris is the chief executive of Poland's biggest cosmetics company. Her husband, Henryk Orfinger, is president. They make 20m units a year from their factory in Piaseczno, a down-at-heel town 12 miles south of Warsaw, which they export to 27 countries.
Seven hundred people are directly employed by the business, including 30 at the Dr Irena Eris Centre for Science, which is at the forefront of international pharmaceutical research.
"One day we want to win the Nobel prize," said Eris, from the conference room at the headquarters. "Yes, you smile, but recentlythree American scientists won the Nobel for their discovery that you can shorten telomeres [the genetic code that protects the ends of chromosomes].
"We were already doing that here, only using the discovery to make anti-ageing products. We were the first people to put folic acid in cosmetics, and the first in Europe to add vitamin K."
Science is important to Eris, an enormously cheerful 60-year-old with a big laugh and a taste for bold jewellery. Downstairs in the Piaseczno HQ is an experimentation lab staffed by 12 "technologists" who, like their boss, all have PhDs.
When the Guardian visited, they were developing a yellow shampoo and working out how much fat to put in a jar of premium Dr Irena Eris face cream.
Her hero is Marie Curie, another Polish scientist who won two Nobel prizes. But she also enjoys being compared to the late cosmetics queen Helena Rubinstein, the Polish emigree whose motto was: "There are no ugly women, only lazy ones."
"Often people don't realise that Poland has long been a centre for cosmetics. Max Factor came from Lodz originally," said Eris.
Max Factor didn't shout about his Polish roots, and even in 2011, Eris reluctantly admits that she has learned to keep quiet about her products' provenance too. "It is sad for me to admit this, but our experience is that's what we have to do. We don't hide it, but we don't show off about it either."
Seven years ago, the Dr Irena Eris line entered the British market via an exclusive deal with Boots. Hopes were high, but sales were low. "We made a mistake by putting Polish on the packaging," she said. "Of course it was also in English, but I think we should not have had it also in Polish. It is sad for me to admit it, but Polish products still have a poor reputation in the west.
"It's not like in France, where you can stick 'made in France' on the side and people will want to buy it. Maybe we should have printed the packaging in French," she mused.
She is optimistic that this image of Poland will change in time, and hopes to be back in Britain before long.
"It's only a short time ago we were behind the iron curtain. We need time to convince the west that Poland is modern and technologically advanced."