Companies rarely see such autonomy.

I blame Hailey Bieber. Justin Bieber’s wife-turned-skincare mogul may not have realized it at the time, but when she launched her Rhode brand in 2022 with the tagline “One of everything very good,” she was ushering in a new, post-sense era of beauty brands. Rhode’s syntactically confusing slogan didn’t stop, and may have even contributed to, it becoming a huge success, culminating in the brand being purchased by elf beauty last year for $1 billion.

I’m not saying that Maybelline specifically had Rhode in mind when it decided to swap out its slogan this week for one that’s significantly less consistent, but I am saying that Rhode paved the way for word salad that Maybelline is currently traveling down.

The company, which is owned by L’Oréal, unveiled its new slogan on Tuesday: “Maybe. We were born with it. Maybe. It’s Maybelline.” If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s not exactly a new slogan but a bizarre remix of an older, fairly recognizable slogan: Maybelline used the previous version of the slogan, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline,” on and off for about 35 years.

As someone reading an article right now, you should first of all be proud that your reading comprehension skills exceed those of Maybelline executives, because you probably immediately spotted the problem here, which is that the new slogan makes no sense. Adding punctuation to a series of words is not only a fun design choice (dots are basically periods!) but a way to change the meaning. The meaning of the new slogan, as far as I can tell, is akin to the shrug emoji and a defeated sigh. Are Were we born with it? Maybelline doesn’t know. But he would like you to stop asking questions and buy some makeup, okay?

The brains behind this new slogan tried to explain their choices in the business press, but only proved that they were perhaps even worse at talking slogans than writing them. Sandrine Jolly, global brand president of Maybelline, told the Wall Street Journal that their goal was to remove ambiguity from the original slogan. “In this ocean of algorithms, of perfection, of always the same model of femininity, we are now in an era where women want to express themselves more and more, starting with who they are,” she told the Journal. “That’s why it was very important to move from the question to the statement.”

Again, there are some problems here: The original slogan, while ambiguous, wasn’t a question. And the new slogan is not a statement. On the contrary, it is an enigma: these are four statements that contradict each other. Maybelline has, mostly by changing the punctuation, turned its perfectly good old slogan into this logic puzzle about a guard who tells the truth and a guard who lies. This would be impressive if it wasn’t so stupid.

In the midst of all this, the company made a substantial update by changing the subject of the tagline from “she” to “we.” Is the all-new punctuation really a way to create confusion so that more pronouns can be smuggled in? If so, don’t they know we’re now in Woke 3.0? Pronouns are allowed again.

What would have been so bad about changing what was widely recognized as a rather popular slogan with a single word? The brand probably would have attracted less attention, for one thing. One of the strangest things about this slogan change is that, if you look at some of the brand’s new campaign, which stars Miley Cyrus, she doesn’t pronounce the new slogan all that differently from the old one. His line reading emphasizes the word maybe but don’t take a break afterwards, like you normally would after a period. Anyone who hasn’t heard of the new slogan could theoretically hear the ads and not notice a change at all. Was that the goal, to create a bit of buzz for a change that isn’t really a change and put just the written, oddly punctuated words in front of Generation Z, who the company deemed to be mostly illiterate? Maybe. They are evil geniuses. Maybe. They are just stupid.