Mario Badescu

A Romanian chemist, who fled Bucharest in 1967, opened a small facial treatment studio on Manhattan's East 52nd Street. The studio still operates today and still sells the same pink drying lotion, his lab mixed in the 1970s. Every bottle ships in an unchanged 40-year-old formulation. Mario Badescu had trained as a cosmetic chemist in Romania before escaping to New York with his wife, working initially as a janitor while building a list of private facial clients. The studio opened in 1967, and his hero product, the drying lotion, launched shortly afterward as a spot treatment with zinc oxide and calamine layered inside a salicylic acid solution. Customers dip a cotton swab directly into the pink layer and apply to a single blemish overnight. The non-shake ritual is the brand's durable moat.