Sharrie Williams, co-author, The Maybelline Story

It will take more than Maybelline—and family biographer Sharrie Williams—to pretty up Mr. Media!

In The Maybelline Story, Sharrie Williams–descendent of the company’s founding father–tells the story of the birth of the Maybelline empire and the fascinating and larger-than-life family that brought it into being.

In 1915, when a kitchen stove fire singed his sister Mabel’s lashes and brows, Tom Lyle Williams watched in fascination as Mabel performed what she called “a secret of the harem”–mixing petroleum jelly with coal dust and ash from a burnt cork and applying it to her lashes and brows. Mabel’s simple beauty trick ignited Tom Lyle’s imagination and the young entrepreneur started what would eventually become a billion-dollar business. Tom Lyle named Maybelline in her honor.

Sharrie Williams is heir to the Maybelline legacy and family steward of the vast documentation that traces Maybelline's history. Sharrie is Tom Lyle Williams’s grandniece and Evelyn Boecher Williams’s granddaughter. As a member of this intriguing family, Sharrie is in a unique position to provide intimate and never-before-told details about the fascinating people behind the founding of Maybelline.

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