MAYBELLINE

MAYBELLINE

The Maybelline Company was founded in New York City by Thomas Lyle Williams on 1915. Williams noticed his older sister Mabel applying a mixture of Vaseline and coal dust to her eyelashes to give them a darker, fuller look. He adapted it with a chemistry set and produced a product sold locally called Lash-Brow-Ine. Williams renamed his eye beautifier Maybelline in her honor. In 1917, the company produced Maybelline Cake Mascara, "the first modern eye cosmetic for everyday use," and Ultra Lash, the first mass-market automatic, in the 1960s.

In 1967, the company was sold by Williams to Plough Inc. (now Schering-Plough) in Memphis, Tennessee. The entire cosmetic production facility was moved from Chicago to Memphis over one weekend. In 1975, the company moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where it is still located. In 1990, Schering-Plough sold Maybelline to a New York investment firm, Wasserstein Perella & Co. Maybelline’s headquarters remained in Memphis until its acquisition by L'Oréal in 1996. Its headquarters was then moved to New York City in 1996 and its factory to Brooklyn in 2000.

Maybelline received a boost when the company hired Lynda Carter as the company's beauty fashion coordinator after her television series ended; she also appeared in several of its television and print advertisements. Josie Maran, Miranda Kerr, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Melina Kanakaredes, Zhang Ziyi, Siti Nurhaliza, Fasha Sandha, Sheetal Mallar, Julia Stegner, Jessica White and Kristin Davis have endorsed Maybelline products. The current faces of Maybelline are Adriana Lima, Christy Turlington, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, Emily DiDonato, Beatriz Shantal, Jourdan Dunn, Gigi Hadid,^[6] Liza Soberano and Urassaya Sperbund. In 1991, the company adopted its advertising slogan “Maybelline, Maybelline Ooh La La”^[7] which was used until 2001 when the tagline changed to "(Maybe she’s born with it) Maybe it’s Maybelline”