Maybelline New York
cosmetics company
Maybelline New York (formerly The Maybelline Company and Mabelline and Co.), trading as and commonly known as simply Maybelline ( MAY-bil-een), is an American multinational cosmetics, skin care, perfume, and personal care company, based in New York City. Founded in Chicago in 1915, it has been a subsidiary of French cosmetics company L'Oréal since 1996.
History
The Maybelline Company was founded in Chicago by pharmacist Thomas Lyle Williams in 1915. Williams noticed his older sister Mabel applying a mixture of Vaseline and coal dust to her eyelashes to give them a darker, fuller look. He adapted it with a chemistry set and produced a product sold locally called Lash-Brow-Ine.
Williams renamed his eye beautifier Maybelline in her honor. In 1917, the company produced Maybelline Cake Mascara, "the first modern eye cosmetic for everyday use", and Ultra Lash, the first mass-market automatic, in the 1960s.
In 1967, the company was sold by Williams to Plough Inc. (later Schering-Plough) in Memphis, Tennessee. The cosmetic production facility was moved from Chicago to Memphis over one weekend.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Maybelline New York” as cosmetics company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as cosmetics company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1351054. VIAF identifies the subject as 9292149068514365730008. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1996, 1917 and 1967.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maybelline New York” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.