For 100 years, Maybelline has helped Women everywhere to find the power of transformation

...gain confidence to pursue dreams

...develop optimism in the face of doubt
...be inspired to pursue what can be
...and build the strength to make it happen, wherever life’s passion takes her.

RAISING AWARENESS Maybelline New York

To raise awareness in-stores and online, we’ve also taken our most iconic products – Great Lash, Baby Lips and Unstoppable Liner - and re-imagined the packaging so that young women everywhere can purchase their favorite Maybelline New York products, for a cause. These limited edition products will be in mass market retailers nationwide now until supplies last. https://www.maybelline.com/thegirlproject

Woman can't be truly independent and free without being financially independent.....

When Women gained the power of Financial Freedom they chose the right to be noticed with MAYBELLINE..

In the 1920's the American frontier had been explored, and cities were now the epicenters of discovery. New technology demanded an expanded workforce. Women defied their stay-at-home roles. With the freedom of their own money, they behaved differently. They even started smoking.

Massive advertising campaigns by Lucky Strike Tobacco Company lured women as well as men into smoking with the slogan “It’s toasted!” After all, what could be more pure and aromatic than toasted, golden leaves.

The public fell for it. With product placement in the first self-serve grocery stores—the Piggly Wiggly chain—it was easy to develop a smoking and Maybelline habit overnight.

No one could stop their little purchases, which included beauty-products. The era when only performers and prostitutes wore make-up had passed.

The age of cosmetics had begun with Lash-Brow-Ine in 1915, which became Maybelline in 1916.....

Irene Rich worked for Will Rogers, John Wayne, John Ford, Ward Bond, Gale Gordon, George M. Cohan.

  She was a Maybelline Model in 1925 . 

Financial empowerment.....is about knowledge and education! 

Read all about it in my book, The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty Behind It..... 

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS MAYBELLINE...a never-before-told story that spans a 100 years and paints the picture of the American Dream.

   My Great uncle Tom Lyle Williams founded The Maybelline Company, in 1915 and owned it until it sold to Plough Inc. in 1967.

   Here is a peek at The Maybelline Story from the 1920's...

                          In the Beginning there was MAYBELLINE....

Noel James and Frances Williams 1917.

But it wouldn't have been possible without.....
Noel J. Williams.

HEDY LAMARR in H.M. Pulham ESQ flaunts makeup in public after WW l..

After World War 1, nice girls didn't paint and powder themselves.  However a new breed of women emerged in 1920 and that's the target market Maybelline captured.  

After the end of World War I, Harry (Robert Young,) gets a job in a New York City advertising company, where he falls in love with a vivacious,independent coworker, Marvin Miles (Hedy Lamarr)... However, she cannot bring herself to fit into his traditional idea of a wife's role. 

Lash-Brow-Ine, became Maybelline in 1917 and Hollywood Stars like Ethel Clayton endorsed the new eye beauty product...helping launch the idea that nice girls did make up their eyes!!  

Nice girls before World War 1, aspired to make a good marriage and not have a career.

When Tom Lyle Williams founded Maybell-Laboratories and produced Lash-Brow-Ine and Maybelline he published a book called The Woman Beautiful, suggesting the virtues of beautifying your eyebrows and eyelashes .

By the 1920's Dime stores couldn't keep Maybelline stocked fast enough...Women were stepping out of the kitchen...into the workplace... painting and powdering their face's in public

and feeling quite comfortable pulling out their make up bag.

TCM was showing Hedy Lamarr and Robert Young in a classic 1941 film called, H.M.Pulham ESQ.  Check out this one minute scene and you'll see the point I've been trying to make.  Hedy Lamarr's character was a modern Maybelline girl in about 1918. 

My Vintage Maybelline Mini Make Up Bags have arrived and are ready for purchase.  Check them out at 
http://www.maybellinebook.com/p/make-up-bags.html
SOLD OUT

Maybelline and the "New Woman" in 1920

Girls, I don't think we're in Kansas any more!

Vogue, Nov, 1920 reveals the new, modern woman.

Two major shifts, in culture and conscienceness, took place in 1920;  Prohibition and American women winning the right to vote.


Women's contempt for Prohibition was a factor in the rise of the flapper.  With newly bobbed hair and heavily made up eyes, the modern woman embraced Maybelline, endorsed by Hollywood Stars,  like Ethel Clayton in 1920.

Social mores in place for a century were obliterated among young women in 1920.  Liquor consumption sky rocketed, skirts shortened, music heated up and America's Sweetheart morphed into The Vamp.

Women, like my great aunt Bunny, discarded old, rigid ideas about roles and embraced consumerism and personal choice.  They were often described in terms of representing a "culture war" of old versus new.

"New Style" feminists, admitted that a full life,

called for marriage and children - 

but had an irresistible compulsion to be 

individuals in their own right."

Read more about Maybelline and it's effect on the modern woman during the 1920's in The Maybelline Story and the Spirited Family Dynasty Behind It.  Signed copy available.