Review: Revlon Grow Lucious Mascara

Photo credit: Revlon website

Alright beauty mavens, we all want long, full, lashes that make people gasp, "Wow, are your lashes real?!" You know the kind I'm talking about, lashes so long and full when you bat your eyes you could fan a small village. Yes, those. Drooling at the prospect of having those yet? Ok, well, here's a mascara that won't help you accomplish that. Avoid Revlon's Grow Luscious mascara. Keep your $10 for something more useful that will satisfy you, like say, lunch. This product just doesn't deliver. 

I should take a step back here and say that I just couldn't make it through the 30 days necessary to see any visible difference in my lashes (which are already long, they just can't fan a village and dangit if I'm not gonna try to get them to do that). This mascara's faults make it quite difficult for me to want to wear it every day for a month. Well, not unless dark, black under-eye circles come into style and I desperately want to one-up the gals who just decided to stop wearing concealer. If you don't like reading between the lines, I'll just outright say it, this mascara flakes, runs, smudges, and has absolutely no staying power -- and I got the waterproof version!

Do my lashes look dark and long after I apply this, well, yes. But, and this is a big but (cue Sir Mix-A-lot song here), it lasts all of maybe (MAYBE) an hour or two. By lunch time, my mascara has traveled, in the form of flakes that smudge, from my lashes to my under-eye area. And no, it's not because I'm rubbing at my eyes. It just flakes right off. Lame!

Moving on from its lack of staying power, and on to another reason to kvetch. Let's talk about this brush. Um, hi, Revlon, could you have possibly made this mascara brush any larger, clumsier, and difficult to use? I suppose maybe if you were trying for that you could surprise me with additional mascara brush obstacles. But lets just focus on the ones you gave me here. 

The brush is large and dense, but I would say a bit too large and too dense, because what you end up with is a whole lot of mess on your eyes. I don't really have small eyes, they aren't doe eyes either, but they aren't small, and I just couldn't manage it. No matter how careful I was, I always end up with mascara on my eyelid, ruining my nicely done eye makeup. Good thing I keep Q-tips on hand since my long-ish lashes tend to cause me to usually get mascara on my lids, the difference is it's from the tip of my lashes touching the lid (read: little dots of mascara here and there), as opposed to it being from the brush and the globby mess of product landing on my eye (read: mascara all over the lash line, making it look like messy liner). In other words, this is definitely not the mascara you want in your purse, you know, the on-the-run, save-me-in-a-pinch mascara, unless you want to fix mascara blobs with Q-tips when you're on the go. I'm no novice to applying mascara, so I refuse to chalk this up to user error. 

But wait, there's more. The brush also ends up with a lot of goop at the tip. So, now, not only is the brush too big to get those precious inner-corner lashes that give you that full, voluminous lash effect, if you try to reach them with the tip of your brush, you just get a huge ink blot on your eye. Great, now I get a Rorschach test on my face, awesome. But Erika, couldn't you just wipe the excess product away? Why yes, of course I could, and I do, which leads me to pointing out that this is a waste of product. If I liked this mascara, I'd be bummed to basically lose a large portion of product to a Bounty paper towel. 

But Erika, couldn't you just wipe the excess off back into the tube? Well, I could, but I've got one word for that: bacteria. I don't want black under eye circles, and a bad case of eye infection. Not good. I'd rather lose the product, and since I'm not loving this product, I'll gladly give it to the Bounty paper towel. 

Now, I've read that some people experienced a lot of clumping due to the big dense brush that picks up too much products. I didn't experience all that much clumpiness, but then again, I was fixated on all my other issues with this mascara. Sorry, Revlon, but you missed the mark. I really really wanted to like this, but I definitely think this was an epic fail.  

Revlon's Grow Luscious Mascara left a lot to be desired. I'm certainly not going to repurchase it. It's just plain blah, certainly not worth the $10 ($9.50 plus tax) it cost me at CVS. No thanks. I suppose that's what I get for purchasing this product in a pinch (I'd forgotten to apply mascara and on my way to where I was headed I stopped at CVS and bought it) without reading reviews on it.

I think I may try out L'Oreal's Lash Boosting Technology next. Has anyone tried it out?  If anyone had good or bad experiences with it, let me know. I'll be researching this one before I plunk down any money for it. Lesson learned. The quest for fan-like lashes continues. Until then, a small village will have to invest in its own fan.

How about you readers, have you tried out Grow Luscious? Did you have the same experience?