Brush Revolution

Those eyes, so vibrant and alluring. They draw you in and that flash of lash whispers about a secret. Her secret. Perhaps she'll share it. Can you get close enough to slip beneath the covered lashes? To slip into her world? Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Mabelline.

This sort of gimmicky advertising is why I have a love-hate relationship with mascara.

It's not that I love to hate it, but I love it and I hate it. Who am I kidding right? We do look better with mascara. So in my constant pursuit to cast myself as an object worthy of appreciation, I'm constantly buying new mascara. My relentless desire to attain "the look" of the moment keeps me from throwing out the old ones. I have maybe eight tubes of mascara at all times that I'm willing to use. I'll toss the really old ones when they start to smell like tire rubber; there's no way I'm swiping that brush anywhere near my eyes.

Maybe it's because the less expensive brands do all the marketing that I'm not much for designer mascara. I've yet to see one with an ultra high price tag work much better than cheaper versions. Go to Sephora and try it for yourself if you don't believe me.

If you're a label reader you'll know that there isn't much difference between the content of the designer mascaras and the drugstore brands. Either way you can choose among colors or select waterproof instead of washable. But when selecting between the high end to the discounted you're better off buying the drugstore mascara in mass. Newness, as it turns out, is what keeps your mascara fresh and your brush clump free, thus having more unopened tubes proves far more effective than spending all that cash on luxury priced mascaras because the quality disparity of the actual mascara (its popularity, btw, evolved in the early 20th century when women began tinting Vaseline with coal dust and using it to coat their lashes) isn't really distinguishable.

As a point of fact I haven't seen too many ads expressing new formulas for mascara, rather their revolution is in brush types. What's amusing about this is how vendors describe brushes in order to encourage us to select the "colossal brush" with "9x the volume in one coat," that promises "no clumps." Where's the data on this? Prove to me that one coat of "the COLOSSAL" provides 9x more "volume" than another mascara.