Vaseline® is personal care brand of skin creams, lotions and cleansers. Vaseline is a internationally registered trademark name wholly owned by Unilever PLC.
While the Vaseline brand covers a wide range of skin care products, it is most closely associated with petroleum jelly where it continues to be the global leader. Thus the close association between the brand and the product has lead to consumers mistakenly calling all types of petroleum jelly as “Vaseline”. Only petroleum jelly packaged and sold by Unilever under the Vaseline Brand name is able to call itself Vaseline.
== History ==
The first known reference to the name Vaseline was by the inventor of petroleum jelly, Robert Chesebrough in his U.S. patent of 1872: “I, Robert Chesebrough, have invented a new and useful product from petroleum which I have named “Vaseline…” . The name has anecdotally claimed to be from the German word for water, wasser (pronounced vahser), and the Greek word for oil, elaion, but this is unconfirmed.