There’s a jar sitting in almost every bathroom cabinet in the world that hasn’t changed its formula since 1872 and it just walked away with some of advertising’s biggest awards.
Vaseline, the humble petroleum jelly invented by chemist Robert Chesebrough, has quietly become one of the most talked about beauty brands on the internet. Not because Unilever launched a flashy new product, but because it did something most 150 year old brands are too slow, too cautious, or simply too busy to do. It listened. Because for years people have been using Vaseline for things it was never marketed for. Creators on TikTok and Instagram have applied it as a lash tamer before mascara, used it to shine leather boots, swiped it on as an overnight lip mask, and layered it under makeup for a dewy, “glazed skin” finish. None of this came from the brand’s playbook. It happened organically, repeated itself endlessly, and eventually reached a scale no marketing team could ignore. By 2025, more than 3.5 million social posts were circulating these unofficial “Vaseline hacks,” collectively pulling in hundreds of millions of views.
Most legacy brands would have watched from the sidelines, perhaps issued a cautious disclaimer, and moved on. Vaseline didn’t. Instead of policing the chaos, Unilever’s in-house scientists got to work verifying it. They tested thousands of these viral claims, from separating the genuinely useful like lip conditioning, shoe shine to the unsafe or unproven, like using it for teeth whitening or ingestion. The hacks that held up under real scientific scrutiny earned an official “Vaseline Verified” seal, and the brand turned the testing process itself into short, shareable lab videos featuring its own research team as the stars.
That single move changed the relationship between the brand and its audience. Vaseline stopped being a company that just made a product and started being a company that fact checked a movement it never started and began to earn trust with a generation that trusts almost nothing a brand tells it directly. The industry noticed too, with the campaign picking up a Titanium Lion and two Grand Prix at Cannes. But the trophies were never really the point.
The follow up, Vaseline Originals, went a step further by turning the creators behind the best hacks into actual collaborators by tracking them down, crediting them publicly, and giving them a share of sales on products built directly from their ideas, including a primer and highlighter stick and a body care jelly applicator.
None of this would land, though, if the product itself didn’t back up the attention. Pure petroleum jelly is an occlusive, meaning it seals in moisture rather than adding it, exactly why it performs so well as a skin protectant, lip treatment, lash tamer, shoe shine, and makeup finisher all at once.
Vaseline’s story is ultimately a reminder that the most valuable insight in any business might already be sitting in the comments section. The brand didn’t invent a single new use case, its customers did. What Vaseline did was build the infrastructure to listen, verify, and give credit back to the people driving the conversation and for that they picked up close to twenty Lions at Cannes along the way. Stop chasing the next big idea. Your customers are already telling you how to grow. You just have to pay attention.
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