Maybelline's New Punctuation Sends Brand Mentions to 68x Normal Volume

Maybelline's retooled tagline drove brand mentions on X, Reddit, TikTok and Instagram to 68 times typical volume within two days of launch, with 48% of them negative, according to social media monitoring firm PeakMetrics.

The beauty brand changed its 35-year-old line, "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline," to "Maybe. We're born with it. Maybe. It's Maybelline." The swap replaces "she" with "we" and adds periods that split the sentence into staccato fragments. The response has mostly been confusion over what the updated line means.

One X user wrote: "maybe. Maybelline marketing department. stroke. maybe. Having." The Cut argued the brand should not have changed the line at all.

Sandrine Jolly, global brand president of Maybelline, previously told Marketing Brew the changes were intended to remove the "ambiguity" and position "maybe" as representative of the "endless possibilities" for the brand's consumers.

Why are the periods causing so much trouble?

Ashley Rutstein, founder of Stuff About Advertising, broke down the tagline in a LinkedIn video. She said she understood the pronoun change, but "the periods are where they lost me."

Rutstein argued the problem goes beyond punctuation. "The original line used 'maybe' as an adverb," she said. "The new line uses it as a noun." That shift only occurred to her while she edited her first video on the campaign, forcing a second take.

"It's so confusing," Rutstein said. "I'm a copywriter. I look at words all day long, I analyze them all day long, and I stared at this for hours. It took me all day to figure out what they were trying to do."

Maybelline has been asked about this interpretation and has not yet responded. The parsing difficulty itself may signal something larger about how audiences now engage with brand communications.

"The way people react to brands now is so different," Rutstein said. "The general public is so in tune with advertising and marketing now that people outside of the industry are dissecting it just as much as we are. So when they see something like this, they're applying their general-public brain to it, and it just makes no sense. Like, why would this marketing team need to do that? Why would they need to change this iconic thing?"

What do the numbers say about the reaction?

PeakMetrics data, shared with Marketing Brew, breaks the two-day surge down further:

• 48% of mentions were negative, 28% positive, 24% neutral
• About a quarter of mentions took issue with the wording or punctuation
• 38% of posts used jokes or sarcasm to discuss the change
• 59% of posts framed the change as "forced inclusivity or political messaging"

The substantial share of politically framed posts suggests the fallout extends beyond copywriting critiques. Changing an iconic line, much like a rebrand, is no longer as simple as it once was, and can land a brand in the middle of the culture wars.

The attention, negative or not, is driving conversation. For a punctuation edit, 68 times normal mention volume is a result most campaigns never approach. The question Maybelline now faces is whether the notoriety converts to sales or simply becomes a case study in why some taglines are best left alone.