Maybe. This Is the Worst Slogan of All Time. Maybe. It’s Genius.

Consumed By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Nov 11, 20262:43 PM Photos by Maybelline Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I blame Hailey Bieber. The wife of Justin Bieber turned skincare mogul may not have realized it at the time, but when she launched her brand Rhode in 2022 with the tagline “One of everything really good,” she was ushering in a new, post-sense age of beauty brands. Rhode’s syntactically confusing tagline didn’t prevent, and may have even helped, it to become a massive success, culminating in the brand being acquired by e.l.f. beauty last year for $1 billion. I’m not saying Maybelline had Rhode specifically in mind when it decided to trade in its slogan this week for one that’s notably less coherent, but I am saying that Rhode paved the word-salad path that Maybelline is currently tossing its way down. The company, which is owned by L’Oreal, unveiled its new tagline on Tuesday: “Maybe. We’re born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not exactly a new slogan but a bizarre remix of an older, quite recognizable one: Maybelline used the earlier version of it, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” on and off for about 35 years. As someone who is reading an article right now, you should, first of all, feel proud that your reading comprehension skills exceed those of Maybelline’s executives, because you probably immediately spotted the problem here, which is that the new slogan doesn’t make a lick of sense. Adding punctuation to a series of words is not just a fun design choice (periods are basically polka dots!) but a way of changing meaning. The new slogan’s meaning, best as I can tell, is something akin to the shruggie emoji and a defeated sigh. Are we born with it? Maybelline doesn’t know. But it would like you to stop asking questions and buy some makeup, OK? The brains behind this new tagline attempted to explain their choices in the business press, but proved only that they may be even worse at talking about taglines than they are at writing them. Sandrine Jolly, Maybelline’s global brand president, told the Wall Street Journal that their aim was to remove the original slogan’s ambiguity. “In this sea of algorithms, of perfection, of always the same model of femininity, we are now in an era where women more and more want self-expression, to start with who they are,” she told the Journal. “That’s why moving from the question to the statement was very important.” Again, there are a few issues here: The original slogan, though ambiguous, was not a question. And the new slogan is not a statement. If anything, it’s a riddle: It’s four statements that contradict each other. Maybelline has, mostly by changing punctuation, turned its perfectly good old slogan into that logic puzzle about one guard who tells the truth and one guard who lies. It would be impressive if it weren’t so dumb. The company did make one substantive update in the midst of all this by changing the slogan’s subject from “she” to “we.” Is all-new punctuation actually their way of creating some confusion so they could smuggle in more pronouns? If so, don’t they know we’re in Woke 3.0 now? Pronouns are allowed again. What would have been so bad about making a one-word change to what was widely acknowledged as a pretty well-liked slogan? The brand probably would have earned less attention, for one thing. One of the strangest things about this slogan change is that, if you watch some of the brand’s new campaign, which stars Miley Cyrus, she doesn’t actually say the new slogan all that differently from the old one. Her line reading emphasizes the word maybe but doesn’t pause after it, like you normally would after a period. Anyone who didn’t hear about the new slogan could theoretically hear the ads and not register a change at all. Was that the aim, to get a little buzz for a change that isn’t really a change and to only put the written, bizarrely punctuated words in front of Gen Z, whom the company has written off as mostly illiterate? Maybe. They’re evil geniuses. Maybe. They’re just stupid. Beauty Fashion