Case Study: How Vaseline turned beauty hacks into a product line
Beauty trends are increasingly written by everyday creators rather than brands, and Vaseline decided to formalise that shift.
With Ogilvy Singapore, the Unilever brand turned verified viral hacks into a real product line, Vaseline Originals, and publicly credited and rewarded the creators who originated them.
The challenge
For years, people have reimagined what a tub of Vaseline jelly can do, from taming brows to setting a base for makeup, sharing the results across blogs, YouTube and TikTok. More than 3.5 million Vaseline hack-related posts now exist online. The brand had already proven those hacks worked through its award-winning Vaseline Verified platform, which lab-tested community uses and picked up a Titanium Lion at Cannes. The open question was what to do for the creators themselves, who had shaped culture around the product without recognition or reward.
The idea
Vaseline Originals reframes the brand from product maker to platform, moving, in the agency’s words, from ownership to stewardship. Rather than simply validating trends, Vaseline traced its most popular hacks back to source, identified the original creators, named them Vaseline OGs, and built actual products around their ideas, sharing commercial success with them in the process.
Nicolas Courant, chief creative officer at Ogilvy Singapore said “We started with a simple creative provocation: what if the best ideas were never in the boardroom, but already in people’s bedrooms and everyday routines? We traced how Vaseline was being used in culture back to its origins and found the OG creators who had been shaping these hacks long before they became mainstream. Vaseline Originals is a move from ownership to stewardship, honouring our OG content creators by sharing our success with them.”
The work
Two creators anchor the launch. In 2008, beauty creator Jen Chae (@frmheadtotoe) shared a Vaseline brow tamer hack on her blog. Lauren Luke (@laurenluke_panacea81), one of YouTube’s earliest beauty creators, introduced a Vaseline primer hack that made techniques more accessible to everyday users.
Almost two decades on, their ideas have become the Vaseline Brow Tamer, inspired by Chae, and the Vaseline All-In-One Primer & Highlighter Jelly, inspired by Luke.
Both products debuted on a TikTok Live featuring the creators.
“For years, creators have been reimagining what Vaseline jelly can do, often without recognition. This campaign is about giving credit where it’s due: acknowledging, celebrating and rewarding the people behind those ideas,” said Nathalia Amadeu, global brand director, Vaseline at Unilever.
The results
Both products sold out within minutes during the TikTok Live debut, with demand scaling across each drop. The search for further hack originators is ongoing, with more creators set to be certified as Vaseline OGs. The brand positions community-led innovation not as a one-off stunt but as a repeatable engine for relevance, sitting alongside other brands turning fan hacks into reality.
“Vaseline Originals represents a deliberate strategic shift in how we build this brand, moving from validating what the community creates to actively shaping and developing ideas inspired by them. It shows that community-led innovation isn’t just culturally resonant. It’s a growth engine,” said Aanchal Sethi, Asia managing director, Unilever at Ogilvy Singapore.
Campaign developed by Ogilvy Singapore for Unilever’s Vaseline.
For more case studies like this, sign up to our newsletter.
