LASHING OUT

My journey began when I started shopping for a brown mascara. Picturing a rich mid-toned mahogany, I stepped through the doors of Sephora. With crossed fingers I popped around to some of my favourite formulas only to be greeted with the one colour-black in regular or waterproof. When I was researching for this post Sephora only had two brands at their flagship store in Vancouver that carried a brown mascara, Lancôme and Dior.

I decided to test my luck with the Lancôme Hypnôse Volumizing Mascara in “Brown”. My first thought while applying it was that it still looked like a black mascara, only softer. The formula was also thinner than most on the market, which seems to be a common theme with brown mascara.

Brown mascara in the current market seem to have only two variations with deep brown or soft brown. With the diversity of hair colour that we all have and with everyone’s eyelashes having different tones, why are beauty brands only producing black mascara?

I recalled one of my clients, who has bright red hair and a very fair complexion, looking for a mascara that matched the tones of her hair while being less dramatic. She ended up using an eyebrow gel because it was the closest colour to her hair. For safety reasons I do not recommend this as brow gels are not tested for the eye area.

The only product on the market that can create any colour of mascara is MAC Mixing Medium for Lash. This innovative product is mascara base that you can mix any pigment into to create a customized colour. While a little more time consuming to create, it is an easy texture to work with and is more volumizing than any brown mascara I’ve seen on the market. Since you can mix any pigment with it, this also gives a unique opportunity to play with any colour or texture so you could even create a metallic lash.

 I also noticed many brands that used to carry bright coloured mascara ranges have discontinued those lines. Cosmopolitan wrote an article in June of 2019 called “9 Colored Mascaras That are Actually Easy to Wear.”Out of those nine formulas, only four still exist on the market today.

A common theme I noticed with the more colourful mascara on the market, is that they’re all deep jewel tones most commonly blue, navy or purple. Against deeper skin tones and dark lashes I find these shades will still look like a softer black mascara. I thought back to a client I had in Nordstrom who was looking for a blue mascara. She had a very deep complexion and all of the mascaras we carried were too dull to pop on her skin tone. This was a very disappointing experience for both of us. Especially recalling the options many luxury brands had previously for coloured mascara. For example Yves Saint Laurent at one point had a line with brightly coloured mascaras and even metallic mascara in gold and silver. This year Pat McGrath Labs launched 3 colour saturated shades of mascara in aquamarine, blue and pink, putting coloured mascara back on the luxury market.

I notice the lines that do carry a minimal range of colourful mascara are drug store or small indie brands. There is one exception I’ve found on the market that that does carry a range of brightly coloured mascara and that is Colourpop BFF mascara, which comes in six heavily pigmented colours.

Around 2020 many colourful mascara lines were discontinued. Maybe because sourcing pigments and international shipping became more difficult and obsolete? Perhaps it had to do with how our consumerism around cosmetics became, and the demand was not there anymore also trends come and go. Now that we are wearing more makeup again, hopefully brown & colourful mascara will make a comeback. For now, I will stick with my MAC Lash Mixing Medium.