Maybelline: the vaseline and coal-dust origin of modern mascara

The standard cosmetics-history version of this story is a single sentence: Maybelline started when a man named Tom Lyle Williams put petroleum jelly and coal dust together and sold it as mascara. The longer version, sourced largely from the American Oil and Gas Historical Society’s archive piece on Mabel Williams and the Maybelline Story Blog (run by Williams’s grandniece Sharrie Williams), is more interesting and explains why one accidental product became the entire category.

A kitchen fire in 1915

The setting is a small kitchen in Chicago. Tom Lyle Williams was nineteen, living with his parents and his older sister Mabel. A kitchen-stove flare-up singed Mabel’s eyelashes and brows badly enough that she felt self-conscious. She had been reading about Egyptian and Persian cosmetic traditions (kohl, the harem cosmetic) and improvised: petroleum jelly from the medicine cabinet, the ash of a burnt cork, and a fingertip of coal dust scraped from the stove. She mixed them on a saucer and applied the result to her lashes.

Tom watched her do it. He was already running a small mail-order business out of the family home selling a hair-and-scalp tonic called Mi-Rage. By his own later account, he understood within minutes that the lash mixture had commercial potential his hair tonic did not. Women in 1915 had no socially acceptable way to darken their lashes outside the theatre. The 1909 Eugene Rimmel mascaro that had reached the American market was technically for men’s beards. Anything obviously cosmetic was still associated with prostitution in mainstream advertising.

Tom bottled his sister’s recipe in a small tin, branded it Lash-Brow-Ine (a name that was a concession to the petroleum-jelly content, the “-ine” suffix following Vaseline), and sold it by mail order through the back pages of women’s magazines. The first year’s sales paid for the next year’s advertising. By 1917 he had renamed the company after his sister and the petroleum jelly together: Maybelline.

Why the recipe worked

The kitchen recipe was crude, but it solved a real problem. Coal dust and burnt-cork ash are both essentially fine carbon particles, the same pigment principle that makes modern mascara black (modern formulations use iron oxides and carbon black instead, for safety). Petroleum jelly provided three things at once: it was a vehicle that held the carbon in suspension, it was occlusive enough to coat the lash without immediately flaking, and it was something almost every American household already had on hand for chapped lips and minor cuts.

The Vintage News piece on Williams notes the formulation also dried slowly enough that a woman could correct mistakes for the first thirty seconds. That mattered, because most 1915 buyers had never applied a cosmetic to their lashes and needed forgiveness in the formula.

The first iteration was a viscous semi-liquid, applied with a fingertip or a small brush bought separately. By 1917, with help from the chemists at Park-Davis (the same Park-Davis that would later become part of Pfizer), Williams reformulated it as a pressed cake. Cake mascara was the dominant format from 1917 until the 1950s, sold in a small tin with a stiff bristle brush that you wet with water or saliva. Five-and-dime stores carried it for ten cents.

If you watch a 1920s film like Pandora’s Box or any of the early Clara Bow features, the heavily darkened lashes you are seeing are cake mascara applied wet. The technique is recognisable in the 1920s flapper tutorial; the geometry of the eye comes from the lash density even more than from the kohl liner.

From cake to tube

The shift from cake to liquid mascara took forty years. Helena Rubinstein launched a tube version in 1958, with the wand-and-spool applicator most of us still use. The advantage was hygiene (no shared water, no contaminated bristle), but the chemistry shift was bigger than it looks. Liquid mascara needed water-soluble emulsifiers, a film-forming polymer (PVP or acrylates), and a wax-and-oil system that would not separate in the tube but would dry on the lash within seconds.

Maybelline did not lead the liquid transition; they followed it. But the company’s 1971 Great Lash mascara, with its bright pink and green tube, became the bestselling mascara in American drugstores for thirty straight years. The formula is essentially unchanged since launch. According to Wikipedia’s Maybelline entry, Great Lash sold roughly one tube every 1.5 seconds at peak, and is still available today for under five dollars.

What Mabel got

The thing the standard story leaves out is what happened to Mabel. She married into a different family within a few years of the kitchen-fire incident and was never a part of the company in any operational sense. Tom kept her name on the brand but never split equity with her. The Maybelline Story Blog, written by a family member, is careful about this: Mabel was honoured, but she was not a partner. The company sold to Schering-Plough in 1967 and to L’Oréal in 1996 for about $508 million. The Williams family was bought out long before the L’Oréal sale.

If you wear a classic cat eye with mascara in the morning, you are almost certainly using a descendant of Tom and Mabel’s stove-top experiment. The chemistry has improved. The petroleum jelly is gone. The coal dust is gone. But the basic idea (a dark, oily substance applied to the lash with a small implement, sold inexpensively to women who want their eyes to look bigger) is exactly the idea that came out of a Chicago kitchen in 1915. The whole category descends from one improvisation that could have stayed in the family medicine cabinet.

It is one of the rare moments where a household trick scaled into an industry without being polished beyond recognition first. The polishing came later.

A small footnote on the cork

The burnt-cork detail is the one that gets quoted out of every retelling of the story, and it deserves a small footnote. Burnt cork was a stage-makeup staple in 1915. Touring vaudeville acts carried it in their kits. It produced a sooty, soft black that lined eyes and brows in low gaslight without the harsh edges of grease paint. Mabel almost certainly knew about it from theatre publications or from her brother Tom, who had worked briefly in stage advertising before his mail-order days. The “harem secret” framing the family later used in advertising was marketing colour. The actual material was already in circulation. What was new, and what the family understood faster than anyone else, was the idea of putting it in a small tin and selling it to a woman who would never go on a stage.

The other footnote worth keeping in mind: the 1915 product was not approved by any regulatory body, because none of the relevant ones existed yet. The Food and Drug Administration’s authority over cosmetics did not arrive until the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and even then cosmetics were regulated more lightly than food or drugs. The first formal eye-safety standards for mascara components were a postwar development. Williams was operating in a regulatory gap that was wide enough to drive a Vaseline-and-coal-dust formula straight through. Whether that is a sign of his ingenuity or the era’s tolerance is a question worth holding lightly. The product worked, women bought it, and almost no one was harmed.

The Maybelline story is unusual among cosmetics origins because it has a kitchen scene at the centre of it. Most beauty companies trace back to a chemist’s bench, a department-store counter, or a clinical trial. Williams started with a saucer of petroleum jelly and a sister with singed lashes. The fact that the resulting category became the second-largest segment of the modern mass-market beauty industry (after lipstick) is, in retrospect, the kind of statistical accident that makes the cosmetics business strange. The fire could have happened to anyone. The recipe had been used by stage performers for half a century. What was different was the nineteen-year-old in the next room who saw a product where everyone else would have seen a small domestic mess.