Maybelline Retires "Maybe She's Born With It" After 35 Years

On November 10, 2026, Maybelline New York officially retired "Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline," the tagline it has used for 35 years. The L'Oréal-owned brand replaced it with a reworked version that adds a full stop after each "maybe" and swaps "she" for "we": "Maybe. We're born with it. Maybe. It's Maybelline."

The punctuation shift has drawn sharp reactions from beauty editors. Allure's acting features director Kara McGrath said: "I truly think the original was the best beauty tagline ever—in terms of memorability, clarity, cleverness. You could sing it!" Senior copy editor Dawn Rebecky questioned the pauses directly: "Why would any company take an 8-word tagline that rolls off the tongue and insert three different pauses into it?" She proposed keeping the "we" but dropping the punctuation, arguing it "works for being more inclusive and doesn't make us all sound like Christopher Walken."

Why did Maybelline change the slogan?

Sandrine Jolly, global brand president of Maybelline, framed the change as deliberate. "The [previous] jingle was giving ambiguity—it was more of a question," she 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."

Allure's executive beauty director Jenny Bailly read the periods differently: "'Maybe.' reads as skepticism, not potential. Now it's more like, 'Sure, maybe. (But probably not.)' With a period, the tone feels dismissive, or even sarcastic, not confident and hopeful."

Who fronts the new campaign?

Miley Cyrus, who joined Maybelline as a global ambassador in 2025, leads the campaign. She said in the campaign 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."

Has Maybelline done this before?

This is the brand's second attempt to retire the line, and the first attempt ended in a reversal:

• In 2015, Maybelline swapped "maybe it's Maybelline" for "Make It Happen."
• Nearly a decade later, the brand reported that 84 percent of consumers still recognized the original sentence as Maybelline's own.
• In 2024, it brought the tagline back with a campaign starring Gigi Hadid and Storm Reid.
• In 2025, Miley Cyrus recorded an original song built around the slogan—using only "maybe it's Maybelline" in a minute-long jingle.

The original line sits alongside CoverGirl's "easy, breezy, beautiful" and L'Oréal's "because you're worth it" among the most recognized taglines in beauty. If the 2015 reversal repeats, the periods may not last.