Family finds century old cosmetics box revealing Kaunas businesswoman’s story

A family clearing a storage room in an old apartment in central Kaunas discovered a wooden box containing empty cream tubes that had belonged to Marija Nikolskienė, who ran a cosmetics business in interwar Kaunas, LRT reports.

The box had been hidden at the back of the storage room for almost a century. The family had previously found bottles and ingredients that may have been used to make powder, but the newly discovered tubes were an especially rare artefact.

“At the very back, we found a nailed-up wooden box. When we opened it, we saw empty tubes, probably prepared to be filled with cream,” Viktorija Nikolskytė told LRT.

Nikolskytė said her family had passed down the story of her great-grandmother from one generation to the next. After being left alone with two young children, Marija did not give up on her ambitions. She completed studies abroad and later established a cosmetics laboratory in Kaunas called Mėlynoji tulpė, or Blue Tulip.

“It would have been interesting to meet her, but she died 10 years before I was born,” Nikolskytė said.

She posted information about the discovery in a Facebook group. The find attracted the attention of businessman and collector Julius Urbaitis, founder of the Atominis bunkeris museum. He said old photographs, family possessions and tubes bearing words stamped almost a century ago help bring back the stories of people whose voices have long fallen silent.

Marija was born in 1898 in the Kėdainiai district. Little is known about her childhood, apart from the fact that she graduated from a gymnasium in Latvia. There, according to Nikolskytė, she met her future husband, Aleksander, who was Russian and the son of an Orthodox priest.

The couple settled in Arkhangelsk and had two sons, Vladas and Eugenijus. Their family life ended after the Bolsheviks came to power. Aleksander, an officer regarded as a supporter of the tsar, left for the United States and never returned, the family says.

Marija returned to Kaunas with her two sons, with help from her mother. She studied cosmetology first in Riga and later in Paris before establishing her cosmetics laboratory. The family has preserved posters, advertising leaflets, business cards and labels bearing the laboratory’s logo, as well as some of Marija’s jewellery and photographs.

The family also has a brief letter and a photograph Aleksander sent from the United States. Nikolskytė said the family has tried to trace him using the New Jersey address on the letter, but the address no longer exists. It remains unknown whether he had distant relatives there or started another family.