Maybelline Modifies Famous Tagline With Punctuation
Maybelline has made a significant change to its most famous tagline, “Maybe it’s Maybelline,” by adding three periods and changing the pronoun. The new slogan, “Maybe. It’s Maybelline,” has received mixed reactions from the beauty community.
The original tagline was known for its rhythm and satisfying payoff, which are now lost with the addition of pauses. Kara McGrath, Allure’s acting features director, believes the original was the best beauty tagline ever in terms of memorability, clarity, and cleverness. “You could sing it!” added another colleague. “If it ain’t broke…” interjected several more.
Dawn Rebecky, senior copy editor, questions the decision to insert pauses into the tagline, proposing that the brand keep the “we” and dump the excessive punctuation: “[It] works for being more inclusive and doesn’t make us all sound like Christopher Walken.”
The Brand’s Perspective
Sandrine Jolly, global brand president of Maybelline, explains that the punctuation was carefully considered and the pauses are the point. The brand wants to convey a statement of possibility, rather than ambiguity or doubt. “The [previous] jingle was giving ambiguity—it was more of a question,” Jolly told WWD. “The ‘maybe’ is not a doubt or hesitation anymore: ‘maybe,’ period, is a statement of possibility, and that is what we want to be for women. We believe the evolution of this brand statement is going in the direction of what women need today.”
Maybelline’s new campaign features Miley Cyrus, who joined the brand as a global ambassador in 2025. Cyrus weighs in on the “maybe” of it all in the campaign’s video: “I think of ‘Maybe.’ as all the doors being open. Who you are is something you’re born with, but you can always become something that you’ve dreamt of being by staying true to yourself. I believe infinite possibility is for everyone, and if you can dream it, you can create it.”
A History of Changes
This isn’t the first time Maybelline has tried to get rid of the tagline. In 2015, the brand swapped it out for “Make It Happen” (threatening?) in 2015. Almost a decade later, Maybelline reported that 84 percent of consumers still recognized the catchy little sentence as the brand’s own. So in 2024, they brought it back with a splashy campaign featuring Gigi Hadid and Storm Reid. The next year, they doubled down by having Cyrus record an original song incorporating the slogan, but she notably dropped the first half, instead working only “maybe it’s Maybelline” into a minute-long jingle.
