Maybelline swaps ‘she’ for ‘we’ in its 35-year-old tagline

Maybelline New York has made a tiny edit to a huge piece of marketing history. The 111-year-old cosmetics brand has changed its famous tagline from “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline” to “Maybe. We’re born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.”

The change swaps “she” for “we” and adds two full stops. The result keeps the familiar rhythm and brand name, but moves from describing one woman to speaking as a wider collective. For brand leaders, that is a one-word strategic shift worth reading closely.

01 · A famous line gets a pronoun update

Introduced in 1991, the original line has spent almost 35 years building recall. It was ranked by CBS Outdoor as the most recognisable advertising tagline of the past 150 years. Maybelline did briefly replace it with “Make It Happen” in 2015, but brought the 1991 line back in 2024. That recent return makes the new pronoun change seem more deliberate: the brand is not overhauling the line so much as redirecting it.

The punctuation change matters too. Ending on a firm “Maybe.” instead of a run-on turns the familiar phrase into a declaration. With “We’re born with it”, Maybelline sounds less like it is paying one woman a compliment and more like it is stating a shared belief.

02 · Inclusion through small language choices

The report suggests the change from “she’s” to “we’re” extends the line from one woman to all women, and may also signal a more inclusive or gender-neutral stance. Rather than asking whether that interpretation is too speculative, a CMO can see the mechanics: inclusion is increasingly carried by pronouns, not just by casting, imagery or product shade ranges.

This is not new territory for Maybelline. The brand has changed identity before. It was founded in Chicago in 1915 as Lash-Brow-Ine before a trademark dispute pushed founder Thomas Lyle Williams to rebrand. The name Maybelline is a portmanteau of his sister Mabel and Vaseline. The company later moved to Memphis after being sold to Plough Inc. in 1967, and only added “New York” after L’Oréal acquired it in 1996 and moved its headquarters.

03 · What marketers should take from this

For Indian brand teams, the lesson is not to change a tagline for the sake of it. The move is surgical modernisation:

• Keep the sonic signature. The line still pauses and pays off where it always did.
• Let one word do the strategic work. The pronoun is the repositioning; everything else stays familiar.
• Prepare for the memory test. Iconic lines trigger nostalgia, so weigh fresh meaning against hard-won recall.

Maybelline is betting that “we” makes a classic tagline feel current without surrendering the recognition built over decades. Whether the new version becomes as quotable as the old one is now the question.

Source: Afaqs!

Mad About Marketing Desk The strategists and writers at Mad About Marketing, writing up what we see in the work every week.