Van Cleef & Arpels turned a client’s cigarette tin into a jeweled case.
In the early 1930s Charles Arpels watched Florence Gould, wife of the railroad heir Frank Jay Gould, throw her makeup into a tin box, by one account a Lucky Strike cigarette case. He made a gold or silver case with room for powder, a lipstick, a comb, a mirror and a tiny secret watch, and called it the minaudière, from minauder, French for to simper.
Van Cleef & Arpels on Brandseum