Maybelline has retired its slogan of nearly four decades. “Maybe She’s Born With It. Maybe It’s Maybelline” is being replaced with “Maybe. We’re Born With It. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.”
The original line had been part of American television for roughly 35 years and, according to a 2025 study, ranked behind only “Just Do It” and “I’m Lovin’ It” among the most frequently repeated advertising slogans on social media.
The new version swaps the word “She” for “We” and inserts periods that change the meaning of “maybe” from an open-ended tease into, in the company’s telling, a declaration.
Global Brand President Sandrine Jolly explained the change in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily.
“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.”
Brand ambassador Miley Cyrus offered her own reading of the rebrand, saying “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.”
Not everyone finds the new slogan an improvement. A marketing expert quoted by Forbes argued the original line worked precisely because it didn’t try to explain itself.
“The ambiguity was the whole point. That was the wink. No explanation required. Now they’ve taken something people knew and liked and given them a reason to rip it apart. No one is walking into a drugstore thinking, ‘I would have bought Maybelline, but I didn’t feel included in the punctuation.'”
Allure writer Elizabeth Gulino wrote that the original slogan’s “brilliance” has been stripped of “its rhythm and satisfying payoff,” and said of Cyrus’s explanation of the new version, “I don’t really know what that means!”
The rebrand follows a string of other corporate diversity, equity and inclusion-driven marketing pushes — including at Bud Light, Jaguar and Victoria’s Secret — that drew significant public backlash and were widely viewed as commercial failures.
