Thomas Lyle Williams Put Mascara Into Everyday Beauty

The story began in Chicago in 1915. Williams, then 19, watched his sister Mabel darken her lashes and brows with a homemade mixture involving petroleum jelly and dark pigments. The ritual gave him the idea of a commercial eye product, leading first to Lash-Brow-Ine and eventually to the name Maybelline, derived from Mabel.

By 1917, Maybelline was selling cake eye cosmetics applied with a damp brush. Williams understood early that the product required more than formulation. Advertising in film magazines connected dramatic lashes with the glamour of actresses, while later campaigns used Hollywood faces, before-and-after imagery and prominent retail displays to make eye makeup increasingly approachable.

That shift matters because visible eye makeup still carried social stigma in the early twentieth century. Maybelline gradually helped move mascara from theatrical beauty into a mass-market habit, later expanding into eyeshadow and eyebrow products as the company grew internationally.

Thomas Lyle Williams sold the business in the late 1960s, decades before Maybelline became the global cosmetics name it is today. Yet the company’s central idea remains strikingly close to his original instinct: take a beauty technique, simplify it and make it accessible enough to become routine.

Fifty years after his death, that transformation remains the most enduring contribution of Thomas Lyle Williams.