美宝莲为何改写已有35年历史的经典广告语？

November 10, 2026 will now be known as the day that one of the greatest beauty slogans ever ceased to exist. Maybelline New York is officially retiring its well-known tagline, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” The brand announced today that it would be adding full stops after each “maybe” and swapping the “she” to “we,” turning the 35-year-old catchphrase into “Maybe. We’re born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.”

The addition of three periods (and a change of pronoun) might not seem like a seismic change, but the brilliance of this slogan was its rhythm and satisfying payoff. Both are now gone. And the Allure group chat is shook. “I truly think the original was the best beauty tagline ever—in terms of memorability, clarity, cleverness,” said Allure's acting features director Kara McGrath. “You could sing it!” added another colleague. “If it ain't broke…” interjected several more. But our copy team was perhaps most distraught: “Why would any company take an 8-word tagline that rolls off the tongue and insert three different pauses into it?” senior copy editor Dawn Rebecky asked. She proposes 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.”

Maybelline seems to have underestimated the power of the humble period. “‘Maybe.’ reads as skepticism, not potential,” said executive beauty director Jenny Bailly. “Now it’s more like, ‘Sure, maybe. (But probably not.)’ With a period, the tone feels dismissive, or even sarcastic, not confident and hopeful.” But according to the brand, the punctuation was carefully considered—and the pauses are the point.

“The [previous] jingle was giving ambiguity—it was more of a question,” Sandrine Jolly, global brand president of Maybelline, 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.” Maybe. The brand’s onto something. Maybe. It’s a mistake.

Maybelline’s campaign surrounding this new era stars Miley Cyrus, who joined the brand as a global ambassador in 2025. She 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.”

I don’t really know what that means! (But, as one colleague mused, “easy for a millionaire to say.”) I do know that Maybelline’s slogan was so good. Great, even. It had cemented itself in the Mount Rushmore of beauty taglines, right next to “easy, breezy, beautiful” and “because you’re worth it.” What’s the point in messing with a perfectly structured catchphrase?

There is one glimmer of hope: This isn’t the first time the brand’s tried to get rid of the tagline, so maybe it’s not gone for good. It swapped out “maybe it’s Maybelline” 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. At least that one rolls off the tongue.

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