20 Items Elizabeth Taylor Loved You Can Still Buy Today
Elizabeth Taylor had the most famous eyes in Hollywood. Violet. When she passed away in March of 2011, her personal collection went up for auction at Christie’s in New York. The jewelry alone brought in over 137 million dollars, a world record at the time. But underneath those diamonds and emeralds were dozens of strange, ordinary things.
>> >> Things you would find in your own kitchen, bathroom, or your own purse. And every single one of them is still on the shelves today. You could own what Elizabeth Taylor loved. Let’s start with the bottle. Today, almost every famous person seems to have a scent, a skin care line, or at least a candle with a mysterious name like Moonlight Regret. But Elizabeth was early.
She was not simply lending her face to a bottle. She personally designed her signature scents with master perfumers, >> >> and she wore her own perfumes herself. That is why Passion belongs in this story. >> >> You can still buy it today, and it still feels like Elizabeth’s first serious move from movie star to mogul.
It was warm, dramatic, a little heavy, and absolutely not shy. Then came White Diamonds. This was the big one. In 1991, Elizabeth launched this fragrance with Elizabeth Arden. She was 59 years old. The critics laughed. They thought she was past her prime. They thought a movie star selling perfume in a department store was beneath her dignity.
They were wrong. White Diamonds became the best-selling celebrity fragrance of all time. The franchise has pulled in roughly 1.5 billion dollars in sales. >> >> And it is still on the shelves today, more than 30 years later, in nearly every drugstore in America, for around $30 a bottle. And then, there is Gardenia.
This one is softer, but maybe more intimate. Elizabeth’s Fragrance World describes Gardenia, launched in 2003, as inspired by the aroma of her private garden. Now, let’s talk about a string of small white moons, Mikimoto pearls. By the time Elizabeth Taylor was walking red carpets in the 1950s, Mikimoto was already the gold standard of the pearl world.
Elizabeth wore them at premieres, dinners, and private gatherings in Paris and Rome. But the everyday classic, still on the counter. Let’s go back to the bathroom shelf, a small green tube of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream. The story behind it is wild. Florence Nightingale Graham, an Ontario-born nursing school dropout who adopted the business name Elizabeth Arden, founded her cosmetics company in New York in 1910.
20 years later, she developed a balm she called Eight Hour Cream. The brand has long told the story that the cream healed a customer’s son’s scraped knee in roughly eight hours, and she named the product for the time it took. Now, let’s look at the luxury side of Elizabeth Taylor’s vanity, La Prairie, the Swiss brand that elevated skin care to high art.
While history doesn’t record the exact bottle she emptied, the ultimate choice must have been their Skin Caviar Luxe Cream. Decades later, it is still housed in that iconic cobalt blue jar, and still priced more like a rare sapphire than a face cream. And according to her former assistant, Tim Mendelson, in addition to La Prairie, she used La Mer.
Crème de la Mer was famously formulated by an aerospace physicist to heal his own laboratory burns using fermented sea kelp. Today, a single jar will easily set you back over $200. And back to the makeup table, to a tube of red. In 1953, an American cosmetics genius named Charles Revson, the driving force behind Revlon, launched a brand new lipstick, Cherries in the Snow, which is still in production.
And then comes the ultimate curveball. Late in life, Elizabeth Taylor became obsessed with a lipstick that was almost embarrassingly cheap, MAC Ruby Woo. It’s a definitive cult classic, and you can still grab it tonight for $23. Now, this one actually made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it, because right next to the diamond rings, right next to the Bulgari emeralds, Elizabeth Taylor kept a bottle of Jergens.
Yes, >> >> that Jergens, the pump bottle. Generations of American women have used it on their elbows, their knees, their hands after a long day of dishes. Elizabeth Taylor, by every account, was one of them. And those eyes, the violet eyes we’ve been talking about since the very first second of this video.
How did she line them? Often with a Clinique eyeliner. Their eyeliners became a Hollywood standby for decades. Clinique eyeliners are still everywhere. The exact tool that helped draw the most famous violet eye line of 20th century cinema. Elizabeth’s long-time makeup artist in the last decades of her life >> >> was an Italian woman named Francesca Tolot, already a legend, the one who has shaped some of the most photographed faces in modern entertainment.
And Francesca shared a small, beautiful detail about her most famous client. Elizabeth had a massive collection of Elizabeth Arden lipsticks, drawers full of them, tubes lined up in neat little rows. The shade Elizabeth reached for again and again, the one she trusted to walk her into a room, was called simply Rouge, a clean, slightly blue red.
Next, we should open her closet doors, because now we are talking about an impressive collection of Chanel bags. Of her more than 200 handbags auctioned by Christie’s, a significant portion were Chanel. She wore head-to-toe Chanel, tweed suits in pastel pink and ivory, long strands of pearls layered over more pearls, little quilted black jackets, the flat bag in red, in black, in beige, in pale pink, in gold for evening.
Most of the bags would have been what collectors today call the classic flap. The model number is officially 11.12, the version Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel in 1983 with the now famous interlocking CC turn lock sitting right in the center of the flap. It is a different bag from the original 2.55, glossier leather, a leather woven chain instead of the original all-metal one, and the now famous interlocking CC turn lock replacing the rectangular Mademoiselle lock.
More 1980s in every detail. And then there were the evening clutches, the little quilted minaudières, pearl encrusted and velvet wrapped. Some on slim chains, some held in the hand like jewels. Liz carried them to private dinners. Now look down to her feet. In 1957, Coco Chanel designed a shoe with one very specific trick in mind.
She wanted to make the leg look longer and the foot look smaller, so she made a shoe with a beige body to blend with the leg and elongate it, and a small black cap stitched onto the toe to visually shorten the foot. The single most recognized shoe shape of the second half of the 20th century, maybe outside of the red sole of Christian Louboutin.
Elizabeth Taylor was photographed in Chanel shoes again and again through the 1960s and 70s. The Christie’s 2011 auction of her personal wardrobe included Chanel pieces from that exact era. Today, the slingback is still on every Chanel runway and on every shelf, almost unchanged.
Chanel gave Elizabeth Taylor a silhouette of quiet elegance. Bulgari gave her something louder. Diamonds, scandal, and a love story burning under the Roman sun. Rome, early 1960s. The set of Cleopatra is less a film production than a small empire with a schedule problem. And somewhere in that storm, Elizabeth Taylor meets Richard Burton.
Their affair becomes one of the most watched romances of the 20th century. But while the world stares at the scandal, Elizabeth discovers another love affair, Bulgari. There is a famous line attributed to Burton, “I introduced Liz to beer, she introduced me to Bulgari.
” One of the most iconic Taylor pieces was her Bulgari snake bracelet watch. Christie’s later described it as a coiled gold serpent with a diamond head and tail, emerald eyes, and a hidden watch movement. And here is the beautiful part. The Bulgari Serpenti is still made today. Some of the rings start in the low thousands.
The bracelets go much higher. But it is the exact same line, the same family of design Elizabeth coiled around her wrist on a Roman movie set in 1962. Still made, still for sale. And the most glamorous woman of the 20th century, the woman with the Cleopatra eyeliner and the diamond from Richard Burton, kept a tube of plain, greasy drugstore ointment right next to her bed.
Aquaphor Healing Ointment, made by Beiersdorf, the same German company behind Nivea. The exact same stuff truck drivers use on cracked hands and nurses use on newborn babies. Today, you can grab a tube at any CVS. And Elizabeth Taylor used it on everything. Her face, her lips, her eyelids, her cuticles.
So, here’s an honest question for you. If the most photographed woman alive used a $5 drugstore tube. What exactly are we paying for when we drop 300 bucks on a face cream? Think about it. And that question gets even more interesting when we move to one of the most expensive symbols of love ever sold. New York City.
An Italian-born designer named Aldo Cipullo walks into Cartier’s office and pitches an idea so strange the executives nearly laugh him out of the room. A bracelet you cannot take off by yourself. It locks onto your wrist with two tiny gold screws. The only way to remove it is with a miniature screwdriver, and only your partner gets the screwdriver.
In 1969, it was a revolution. Cartier launched the piece that year and called it simply the love bracelet. And they decided to do something theatrical. They gifted the first bracelets to 25 of the most famous couples on Earth. >> >> Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Elizabeth wore hers like a vow she had chosen to be tied to. And when she and Burton divorced in 1974, remarried in 1975, and divorced again in 1976, that bracelet stayed on her wrist. It outlasted both marriages. You can buy a Cartier love bracelet today. The plain 18-karat gold version retails for around $7,950 today.
The diamond pave versions run from about $36,000 to over $60,000, depending on size and configuration. Same workshops, same tiny screwdriver in the box. More than 55 years later, it is still one of Cartier’s best-selling pieces on the planet. Some traditions just refuse to die. Let’s leave the jewelry box and walk over to the vanity, because Elizabeth Taylor had one beauty rule her makeup artist repeated for decades.
“Never trust a woman,” she said, “who doesn’t wear lipstick.” She lived by that line. Chanel’s modern Rouge Coco Gloss is the spiritual heir of the bold hydrating red she wore in her later years. For her, red lips were never a trend. They were armor. And here’s one thing that almost every documentary gets wrong.
You’ll read online that Elizabeth Taylor washed her famous dark hair with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. It’s a great story. The real Johnson story is more interesting. Elizabeth used Johnson’s Baby Shampoo together with a plain Oral-B toothbrush to clean one of the most famous diamonds on Earth, the Elizabeth Taylor Diamond, a 33.
19 carat stone, originally known as the Krupp Diamond, that Richard Burton bought for her in 1968 for $307,000. After her death, Christie’s auctioned it in December 2011 for roughly 8.8 million dollars. Just a few dollars of Johnson’s and a drugstore toothbrush doing the job perfectly. Now, from the bathroom to the suitcase, because Elizabeth Taylor didn’t just travel, she made traveling a performance.
And one accessory followed her from airport to airport, from Capri to Gstaad, from London to Acapulco, the Cartier silk scarf. Remember the era. In the 1960s and ’70s, paparazzi were brutal. They climbed fences. They followed her boats off the coast of Sardinia. They camped outside her hotels with telephoto lenses.
And the scarf, knotted under the chin, wrapped around her famous dark hair, gave her one small piece of armor. A Cartier silk scarf today runs roughly $500 to $700. Elizabeth understood that with one knot, you can turn a tired Tuesday morning at the airport into a photograph that lands in a museum. Try it sometime.
Which brings us to the very last item. Marfa, Texas. The cast of the movie Giant, directed by George Stevens, has been shipped out into the desert. Temperatures are climbing past 100° Fahrenheit. Elizabeth Taylor, 23 years old, Rock Hudson, 29, James Dean, just 24, stuck in a town >> >> with one main street and not much to do after sunset.
So, Elizabeth and Rock Hudson invented a drink, the chocolate martini. Vodka, chocolate liqueur, and a drizzle of chocolate syrup straight from the glass. Modern versions often add Kahlúa or crème de cacao. A friendship was born that would last 30 years. In July 1985, Rock Hudson became the first major American celebrity to publicly confirm he had AIDS.
He died just over 2 months later. Elizabeth co-founded amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, in 1985. She testified in front of Congress. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars for research. By the time she died, she was one of the most important AIDS activists in American history.
So, the next time you see a chocolate martini on a bar menu, pause for a second. That cocktail was invented by two best friends in a sweltering Texas hotel room. One of them would change the way America talks about a disease. The other would turn her grief into a movement that saved untold lives.
If this story moved you, even just a little, the best thing you can do is hit that subscribe button and stay with us. So, pour yourself something, maybe a chocolate martini, and we’ll see you in the next one.