I'm a sucker for a good mascara. In fact, I'm a sucker for
any mascara that promises something better than the last one that I bought, and let's face it, one of those comes out every month. It's little wonder that UK consumers buy the most mascara: the market is saturated with products promising longer, thicker lashes that give the falsie look without the hassle. Count me in!
Unlike most beauty products that promise a huge improvement on what nature gave us, these mascaras actually deliver on their pledges instantly, so why the heck are cosmetics companies still filming their commercials with lash inserts and enhancing the images in post production?! Enter Rimmel's Lash Accelerator: it promises lashes 117% longer than when you started, and enhances lash growth in the bargain. I know that Rimmel have made their spokesmodel, Zooey Deschanel, look like a cartoon version of herself in the campaign, but I love their mascaras, so I bought one anyway.
My main objective in writing this post is to make my own mini plea to the companies that churn out mascaras with the kind of frequency that most of us buy milk: your consumers are intelligent and interested in what they're buying. They do research, they read reviews, and they take their money to the company with the best product. Mascara purchasing has almost become a lottery and with the highly edited adverts, we're relying on stats, rather than images: yes, you tell us that your trials have shown that the majority of your testers agreed on a whatever-percentage increase in the length of their lashes, but do you treat us to a normal, non-edited photograph of the product in action? Nope. I understand the need to maybe make lashes darker to ensure that the camera picks it up, but you can't tell me that there's no way to recreate the moment when you apply mascara to bare lashes and say 'WOW!' at the transformation! You are doing yourselves a disservice!
The images below are a little crap as my camera's not cooperating at the moment, but you get the idea. Here's me without mascara (excuse the tired face!)...
Below, you can see mascara on my right eye (the left of the photo) and none on the left (the right of the photo). Not the clearest photo, but look at the length of the outer lashes: big difference, no?
Can't get rid of the big gap above, annoyingly! Below is mascara'd eyes...
...and then a close up. In short, I'm delighted with the results!
Another big gap - I have to work out the formatting when I edit photos :)
So, if you're reading this, mascara makers, look at the above comparisons and have faith that your products can actually sell themselves. Save the digital mastery for the movies!
What do you think of mascara adverts? Does it annoy you that companies can't just present their products at face value, or post-production or not, will you continue to buy them, however much the ads are edited?
