New York ? Estee Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into a multimillion-dollar international cosmetics empire, has died. She was 97.

Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest late Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokeswoman.

In 1998, Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine’s list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the century. Her company placed No. 349 in the 2003 ranking in the Fortune 500 list of the nation’s largest companies, with revenue at $4.744 billion.

In explaining her success, the cosmetics queen once said: “I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.”

Lauder sold her products primarily through department stores — Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale’s, Marshall Field’s, Neiman-Marcus, Harrods in London and Galeries Lafayette in Paris.

“Beauty is an attitude,” she once said. “There’s no secret. Why are all brides beautiful? Because on their wedding day they care about how they look. There are no ugly women — only women who don’t care or who don’t believe they’re attractive.”

The company’s product lines have included Estee Lauder, Clinique, Aramis, Prescriptives and Origins.

A favorite selling tool has been offering a gift with a purchase — a giveaway that began out of necessity. Lauder started off without enough of an advertising budget to attract an agency, so she used the money instead for free samples.

Said Lauder, “If you have a goal, if you want to be successful, if you really want to do it and become another Estee Lauder, you’ve got to work hard, you’ve got to stick to it and you’ve got to believe in what you’re doing.”

During the 1930s, she began selling face creams that her uncle John Schotz, a chemist, mixed up in a makeshift laboratory in a stable behind the family house. And she began experimenting with mixes herself.

Lauder went to beauty salons where she gave free demonstrations to women waiting under hair dryers. More often than not, they became customers. Sometimes she stopped women on Fifth Avenue to try her products.

“If you put the product into the customer’s hands, it will speak for itself if it’s something of quality,” she declared.

Estee Lauder became a household name in 1953, when the company debuted Youth Dew, a bath oil and perfume. Over the years she added new lines and new products, including the Clinique line of fragrance-free, allergy-tested products.

In 1995, the company, long tightly held by family members, announced plans to raise $335 million in an initial public stock offering.

This year Forbes magazine estimated the net worth of her sons at $5.1 billion total, ranking them both among the top 300 richest people in the world.