MAYBELLINE: READ MY LIPS
Fifteen shades. Fifteen moods.
One man trying to keep up.
CREATIVE DIRECTION · COPYWRITING · LOCALISATION
& TRANSCREATION · FILM
Maybelline had 15 lipstick shades to launch in Thailand’s crowded beauty market.
The challenge was not simply showing the difference between the colours...
...It was making people feel it.
Read My Lips turned every shade into a mood and every mood into a film.
With a deliberately simple visual idea, the scripts had to carry the campaign: establishing a personality quickly, shifting the emotional temperature, and landing the joke before the lipstick had time to dry. As a copy-based Creative Director, this was exactly my kind of playground.
My team and I built characters, dialogue and comic situations around each shade, having far too much fun deciding what every colour might say and what trouble it might start.
Even a pause, a look or one badly chosen sentence had to reveal the mood. I shaped the Thai copy and English subtitles, translating not only the meaning but also the rhythm, humour and character.
The result was a beauty campaign driven by writing rather than product claims.
Fifteen colours. Fifteen personalities.
And considerably more emotional range than one lipstick launch should reasonably contain.