How a 19-Year-Old Invented Mascara in 1915 It started with a singed eyebrow in a Chicago kitchen in 1915.

Mabel Williams in the center of her High School picture. Morganfield Kentucky 

Tom Lyle Williams was 19, living with his older sister Mabel. According to the family history told by his grandniece Sharrie Williams in The Maybelline Story, Mabel had singed off her lashes and brows in a kitchen stove flare-up. To cover it, she used a trick she called a "secret of the harem" that she'd read about in Photoplay magazine — she burned a cork for ash, mixed the ash with coal dust and Vaseline, and applied it to her brows and lashes to make them look darker and fuller.

Tom Lyle was fascinated. He wasn't a chemist — he was a young entrepreneur with a good eye for what women wanted from the movies. He took Mabel's messy kitchen mix, worked on a more stable, cleaner version in his drugstore contacts, and first sold it as Lash-Brow-Ine. Then he renamed it.

Maybelline = Mabel + Vaseline. He named the company after his sister.

That naming instinct was the first of several founder-level marketing moves that turned a dime-store pot into a billion-dollar brand:

Mail order before department stores. In 1917 he ran tiny 10-cent classifieds in movie magazines like Photoplay. "Beautiful eyes may be had with Lash-Brow-Ine." Women mailed a dime and he mailed back the product. No middleman, no retail buyer needed.

The before-and-after. He is credited as the first beauty advertiser to use before-and-after imagery in print. One eye bare, one eye with Maybelline. It was shocking, clear, and it sold instantly in the comics section and women's pages of newspapers through the 1920s and 30s.

Radio when cosmetics weren't on radio. In the early 1930s beauty brands thought radio was too risqué. Tom Lyle went the other way. He sponsored national shows like The Chase and Sanborn Hour and created his own — Penthouse Serenade from about 1935 to 1937, a late-night romantic music show. He wove in jingles like "Eyes that charm, with Maybelline!" It made Maybelline a household sound, not just a look, and put it years ahead of rivals.

Television in 1946. When there were only about 4,000 TV sets in the New York area, most advertisers were waiting. Maybelline wasn't. In 1946 it became one of the very first cosmetics to advertise on television, adapting its radio jingles and before-and-after demonstrations to the new visual medium. That move — from print to radio to TV in one founder's lifetime — is why Maybelline survived the Depression, World War II rationing, and the post-war boom when hundreds of other mail-order beauties disappeared.

He ran the company from Chicago until 1967, when he sold it to Plough Inc. in Memphis for $135,000,000 in his early deal — a fortune then, and the seed for what is now Maybelline New York under L'Oreal.

The whole arc is still that original kitchen observation: a sister fixing a kitchen accident with coal dust and Vaseline, and a 19-year-old brother who understood that every woman watching a silent film wanted that same transformation, and knew exactly which new medium to tell her about it on next.