Vaseline has jokingly renamed itself Baseline on its social accounts after South Korean beauty creator Min Day Lee went viral for saying the brand that way in an Instagram haul of her petroleum jelly stash.
The clip, posted in August 2026 on her handle @mindaylee_, was meant as a product dump. Lee pulled out mini tins, tubes, and jars and kept calling each one Baseline. Viewers latched onto the delivery. Remixes and stitches followed on Instagram and TikTok. Reports later put the original video past 36 million views.
Lee did not treat it as a slip. In a follow-up she said Korean has no native “v” sound, so English words that start that way often land closer to a “b.” Some commenters heard Baselin or BaSalein. The internet settled on Baseline and ran with it.
Unilever-owned Vaseline answered with a mock official statement on its UK Instagram page.
“We heard you. We agreed.”
Then:
“Following extensive review (by which we mean approximately one video, watched over 1 million times, facts), Vaseline would like to announce our rebrand. Welcome to Baseline, effective immediately.”
The rest of the copy kept the same dry tone. Same tub. Same jelly. Same uses people have invented since 1870. Only the first letter changes depending on where you are saying it. The brand framed the week as a toast to 150 years of local versions of the name. Every accent, it said, is proof of how far the jar has traveled.
Credit went to Lee by handle. Vaseline appointed her “CEO of Baseline, effective immediately, no interview required.” The UK and India accounts swapped their profile art for Baseline wordmarks and circulated fake packaging mockups. That is the extent of the change. The legal trademark is still Vaseline. Store shelves have not been reprinted.
India’s marketing team leaned in separately. Pratik Ved, VP of skincare at Hindustan Unilever, said the company did not invent the moment. “Our job was to simply show up.” The India feed used stretched captions like BASELINEEEEEEE, tagged creators as Vaseline-Verified Hijack Icons, and asked people to post their own takes with #VaselineHijacked.
Min Day Lee is a Seoul-based beauty and lifestyle creator who films skincare collections and routines. Public reporting on the meme has not published her age or a full legal name beyond the byline Min Day Lee. Before this week she was not a household name in English-language media. The Baseline audio made her one overnight.
The product itself dates to 1870, when chemist Robert Chesebrough began selling petroleum jelly under the Vaseline name after seeing oil-field workers use “rod wax” on cuts in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Unilever bought the brand in 1987. The company still sells the classic jelly plus lotions, lip tins, and limited editions in more than 70 countries. The word has become generic for petroleum jelly in plenty of languages, which is part of why a single pronunciation clip traveled so fast.
Coverage from Dexerto, Hindustan Times, and India Today treated the move as a joke campaign, not a corporate filing. News18 put the same point in a FAQ: the name on the jar has not legally changed. Social avatars did.
On X the story split in two directions. One track was the original clip and the brand statement. The other was opportunistic meme tokens using Baseline as a ticker, none of them tied to Unilever. Dexerto’s post about the temporary rebrand passed 120,000 views within hours of going up on August 28.
Lee’s video works because it is specific. A Korean speaker holding a wall of branded minis, repeating one word until the sound becomes the joke. Vaseline’s reply works for the same reason. It did not correct her. It printed her version on the logo for a week and handed her a fake title. That is the whole story.
