‘It’s so confusing’: Punctuation changes to Maybelline’s iconic tagline are breaking brains

Punctuation is often used for greater clarity or dramatic effect. But when added to a short tagline, it can sometimes. Confuse. Everyone.

At least, that seems to be the case with Maybelline’s update to the brand’s 35-year-old tagline, “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” The retooled line now reads, “Maybe. We’re born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.”

The beauty brand rolled out the new—and, to some, not improved—tagline, with changed pronouns from “she” to “we” and the additional periods this week, and the response has mostly been one of confusion about what the updated tagline now means. As one X user wrote: “maybe. Maybelline marketing department. stroke. maybe. Having.”

Meanwhile, The Cut argued that perhaps the brand shouldn’t have changed the line at all.

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

Ashley Rutstein, founder of Stuff About Advertising, broke down the new tagline in a LinkedIn video, noting that while she understood the pronoun change, “the periods are where they lost me.” She argued that confusion may go beyond the new punctuation: “the original line used ‘maybe’ as an adverb,” she said. “The new line uses it as a noun.”

“It’s so confusing,” Rutstein told us, adding that the possible switch to a noun only occurred to her while she edited her initial video breaking down the campaign; she then had to film a second take. “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.”

(We asked Maybelline about this interpretation and will report back any response we receive.)

The confusing use of the word “maybe,” as well as the additional punctuation, has certainly gotten attention in and outside of adland. It may be another indication that the way people pay attention to brands has changed.

“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?”

Like the change or not, it certainly seems to be driving conversation. PeakMetrics, a social media monitoring company, found that in the two days after Maybelline debuted the tagline, brand mentions on X, Reddit, TikTok, and Instagram peaked at 68 times the typical volume, with 48% of them negative, 28% positive, and 24% neutral, according to data shared with Marketing Brew. Of those mentions, about a quarter “take issue with the wording or punctuation,” according to the data.

With that said, many posts about the change are humorous, with 38% using jokes or sarcasm to discuss the change, according to PeakMetrics.

The response to Maybelline’s line, too, could be a sign that, much like a rebrand, changing an iconic line isn’t quite as simple as it once was for brands—and can sometimes land them in the midst of the culture wars. According to PeakMetrics, 59% of posts positioned the changes to the tagline as representing “forced inclusivity or political messaging.”