The world’s largest cosmetics brand is being slammed after promoting an ad featuring a bearded man with his face full of makeup and wearing bright pink lipstick as well as long silver fingernails.
In an Amazon Prime Day advertisement, Maybelline featured influencer Ryan Vita applying Maybelline’s “Super Stay” liquid lipstick for its roughly 12 million Instagram followers.
View this post on Instagram
“Do you really think we would want to buy these lipsticks after seeing this? I love maybelline but can’t handle this. I got scared even by seeing this! Please stop,” One person wrote in response.
“Why are you using MEN TO ADVERTISE THIS? I can’t picture myself wearing any of your lipsticks when all I can see is a whole a** beard and mustache!!! Enough already!” another echoed.
“My eyes hurt,” wrote a third.
In Match, Maybelline promoted Dylan Mulvaney using its concealer with a post captioned #MaybellinePartner.
Maybelline was founded in Chicago in 1914; it has been a subsidiary of the French cosmetics company L’Oreal since 1996. In 1991, the company adopted the tagline, “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.”
In 2023, Suhana Khan, daughter of Bollywood star Badshah Shahrukh Khan, was appointed as Brand Ambassador in 2023.
The backlash against Maybelline echoes last month’s Bud Light-Dylan Mulvaney debacle. After its fiasco with Mulvaney, Bud Light became even cheaper than water, at least at one Pennsylvania store.
The beer brand and its parent company, Anheuser-Busch, have been stuck in a public relations nightmare since it struck an endorsement deal with Dylan Mulvaney, a flamboyant trans influencer who claims to be a woman. Mulvaney posted a video to his 1.8 million Instagram followers on April 1, and sales of Bud Light promptly cratered.
“This month I celebrated my day 365 of womanhood, and Bud Light sent me possibly the best gift ever, a can with my face on it,” Mulvaney said.
After beer drinkers abandoned Bud Light in droves, the company put two of the marketing execs behind the ill-advised idea on ice. But sales have not rebounded, even with prices marked down.
“At this point, it’s cheaper than some of the cases of water we’re selling in the back,” Andy Wagner, the manager of Glenn Miller’s Beer & Soda Warehouse in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times. “It’s just not moving like it used to.”
“It’s not that they stopped drinking beer,” he continued. “They just stopped buying Bud Light.” He said Anheuser-Busch broke “bar rules,” which means “no politics, no religion.”
Bud Light was the best-selling beer in the United States for over 20 years. In 2022, its sales surpassed $5 billion, but it has now been surpassed by Modelo Especial. In the four weeks ending in mid-June, Bud Light sales plummeted an average of 29 percent from the same period in 2022, according to the consulting firm Bump Williams. Since early April, Anheuser-Busch’s stock has plunged over 15%.