Vaseline Vaseline Vaseline is an American brand of petroleum jelly-based products owned by British-Dutch company Unilever. Products include plain petroleum jelly and a selection of skin creams, soaps, lotions, cleansers, and deodorants. In many languages, the word "Vaseline" is used as generic for petroleum jelly; in Portuguese and some Spanish-speaking countries, the Unilever products are called Vasenol. The first known reference to the name Vaseline was by the inventor of petroleum jelly, Robert Chesebrough in his U.S. patent for the process of making petroleum jelly (U.S. Patent 127,568) in 1872. "I, Robert Chesebrough, have invented a new and useful product from
Star jelly of grass". <poem>As he whose quicker eye doth trace A false star shot to a mark'd place Do's run apace, And, thinking it to catch, A jelly up do snatch</poem> That the Starres eat...that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement. When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly. <poem>Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies; Sudden she stops nor longer can