Emma Frost is born in Boston, Massachusetts to the wealthy Winston and Hazel Frost; she is the second of three daughters and also had an older brother, Christian. Winston is cold, ruthless, and domineering, often imposing impossibly high standards on his children, while Hazel abuses prescription drugs to cope with the tensions of her household. Thus, Emma obtains no emotional support from her parents or her sisters Adrienne and Cordelia, but gets along with her homosexual brother Christian. Her father choses her to carry on his fortune, but after seeing her father betray her trust and commit Christian to a mental institution following a suicide attempt, Emma rejects his offer and decided to make her own way.[7]
After a period of homelessness, Emma meets and falls in love with a young man named Troy, who agrees to let Emma live with him. She learns that he owes a large amount of money to a local mobster named Lucien. In order to save Troy's life, Emma agrees to participate in a fake kidnapping scheme in an attempt to extort the remainder of Troy's debt from her father. However, Winston refuses to pay the ransom, and Troy is killed while valiantly attempting to save Emma from an enraged Lucien. After disposing of Troy's corpse, Lucien's thugs handcuff Emma to a pipe and seal her mouth shut with duct tape, intending to kill her later. Adrienne releases Lucien's ransom video to the media, forcing Winston to pay for Emma's safe release. Not content with the money, Lucien still decides to kill her, but by using her powers, Emma turns the thugs against one another and then forces the remaining henchman to free her. Emma takes the ransom money and enrolled in a university,[8] only later auditioning as a dancer for the Hellfire Club,[9] an underground elite society that later was usurped into mutant control with her help by Sebastian Shaw.[10]