No Spider Lashes: Review of L'Oreal Voluminous Miss Manga Mascara

Disclosure: Affiliate links.

This L'Oreal Miss Manga mascara isn't exactly new, but then I'm not exactly a cutting edge, new releases blogger--you may have noticed that. I was slightly worried that it would be discontinued by the time I got around to trying it, because I never hear anyone talking about it anymore. But it seems to still exist. Phew.

Based on the way this stuff is advertised, I fully expected to hate it and to write a fun (i.e. scathing) review about how much it sucks. I don't like clumpiness, and since I have quite thin, stubby lashes, globby formulas do not look good. This is one of those mascaras from the last year or so that exaggerates the spidery clumps (sorry, "mega volume") in its marketing. Here's part of the ad photo from L'Oreal's website:

This isn't the worse example of this marketing trend I've seen, but why is this happening at all? Are they getting inspiration from the worst photos posted on Facebook by Younique distributors and assuming that, because they are so widespread, this is the hottest style? Because I don't actually know anyone who wants their lashes to look like that (Younique sellers aside). Am I wrong? Do you? Not judging, just looking for a real-life source. If nothing else it seems like it would be distracting to have that much heavy crap on my lashes--but then I don't like how fake lashes feel, either, and those are becoming weirdly mainstream too (as in, I get the impression that some people now feel that they need to use fake lashes every day just to look presentable; see also: contouring).

Here's are stills from an animation on the same L'Oreal page that, I guess, is supposed to show what the mascara looks like in reality (not "simulated"). It's not terrible, but it's not great. A bit chunky for my taste. Actually, the thing that probably bothers me the most is that she doesn't have mascara on the tips or the back/top side of her blond lashes, which looks odd to me. As someone with invisible eyelashes, I've learned that they look strange when then are two-tone.

In actual practice, on me, this is just an impressive volumnizing and lengthening mascara--nothing too wild. I was surprised by how much I liked it. Here is a photo of my bare lashes (and eyebrow) and then a photo with two coats of Miss Manga:

Keeping in mind that mascara always looks spikier in a close-up photo than in person, I think this is pretty good! It adds volume and quite a bit of length as well. My lashes are sort of grouped into mini-clumps of a few eyelashes each, I suppose, if you really want to analyze them. That may be the extent of the "manga" effect. I don't think I would be able to achieve the results in the ad photos even with many more coats, but people with much thicker lashes could, perhaps. You might need to use the tip of the brush to push the lashes together to really get it to work. But then couldn't you do that with any mascara?

The design of the brush seems to be intended to apply a lot of product and to separate lashes into distinct clumps. You can sort of see in the photo below that the bristles have wide spaces between them, and the wand is very flexible. It bends easily at that indentation below the brush. I assume this is to prevent it from combing through the lashes too much so that is deposits more mascara. While recognizing how this is supposed to function, it doesn't really do those things when I use it. It works pretty much like a normal mascara wand.

In the past, when I've tried L'Oreal mascaras, my main complaint has been that they don't seem to interact well with my body chemistry, and I'll get a lot of flaking and smearing. I'm happy to report that I haven't had unusual flaking or smearing with Miss Manga. (ETA: See update on flaking here.) Overall, I was (shockingly) impressed with this stuff and might even buy it again. It's easy to use and creates moderate drama--exactly what I'm looking for. I would recommend trying this, especially if you have similar lashes to mine, and you're not, in fact, hoping to look like a cartoon. Amazon has it for under $6.

Sorry, the grumpy review will have to wait for another time. I actually have two disappointing products that I've tried recently on the docket, so stay tuned if that's your jam.

My cheap favorites: the best skincare for $10 or less

Disclosure: Affiliate links.

Here is the long awaited (by me) sequel to my cheap makeup post: skincare. As with the makeup, these are all things I've tried and repurchased because I liked them so much. Trusty and reliable! There are other good cheap options out there, of course, but I'm not going to vouch for anything I haven't used. Please leave your suggestions in the comments, though.

Some categories, again, are missing, because I don't use that type of product (e.g. toner), or I don't have a current favorite, or my favorite is a little more expensive (e.g. targeted products like retinol, or exfoliants, or my favorite sunscreen). And because I like to experiment with new things, I don't have all of these products on hand to photograph at the moment. You should keep in mind that I have combination-oily skin that is not particularly sensitive, and that I don't usually like fragrance in products I put on my face. If you have a different skin type, your results may vary (though you may find some of these things effective anyway).

That's enough preamble and disclaimer. Here's the list:

Favorite Cleanser: I'm using some Paula's Choice face wash at the moment, but my favorites are from Neutrogena.  I especially like the Redness Soothing Gel Cleanser and the Ultra Gentle Daily Cleanser. They do a great job of removing oil and makeup without drying out my skin. The latter comes in a really big bottle for $8-10, so it's an especially good value.

Favorite Facial Wipes: I try not to use these too often because of the waste, but a few times a month when I'm too tired to wash my face properly or when I'm traveling, they are handy. I've tried a lot of brands, and my favorite are the Simple Cleansing Wipes. They are unscented and they remove makeup effectively without causing dryness. They also have a very soft but durable texture (make sure you get the regular ones, not the exfoliating variety). The cheapest place to get them online is in a pack of two (50 wipes total) from Amazon for about $7 (and right now there is a $1 off coupon).

Favorite Makeup Remover: I don't use actual makeup remover on my eyes most of the time (only when I end up with a free sample somehow). Although dual phase formulas can be very effective, I don't like the oily residue they leave behind. It tends to cause milia around my eyes even if I wash it off. Instead, I wash my face first, and then I spread a small amount of Cetaphil Moisturizing Lotion (about $10) on my upper and lower lids and wipe it off with a dry tissue or cloth. It removes all the makeup residue and--bonus--my eye area is left moisturized. If I have a lot of waterproof mascara caked on my lashes, the lotion doesn't remove it instantly, though it does clean up any that has transferred to my skin. And I have a huge bottle of decent, gentle moisturizer that I can use for whatever other purposes I want. (You can also use moisturizer like this as a cleanser in a pinch--or if you find most cleansers drying. Apply it to your dry skin and massage lightly, splash on water and massage some more, and rinse.)

Favorite Daytime Moisturizer with Sunscreen: This isn't my sunscreen. As I said above, the everyday facial sunscreen I use costs more than $15 (though a bottle lasts me a year). But I work from home, and some days I don't get out of the house until after dark. On those days, I like to just use SPF in moisturizer for a little protection and one less step in the morning. I'm a big fan of the Simple Protecting Light Moisturizer SPF 15. I tried to go without it when I finished my last bottle, but I really missed it, so this is my second. As the name suggests, it's not fancy, but it does a great job of moisturizing and absorbs quickly. It doesn't burn around my eyes like lotions with higher (chemical) SPFs tend to do. This is the theme here: it does what it's supposed to do very well and doesn't do anything I don't like. It's cheapest on Amazon, where it's around $8 (I've seen it in stores for up to $14).

Favorite Acne Spot Treatment: Lots of people like benzoyl peroxide for acne, but I tried to get it to work for years and it never did anything for me other than bleach my sheets and towels. I've found tea tree oil more effective. I dip a q-tip in it and dab it on individual zits. With oils like this, there's a lot of variation in strength (even though they all say "100%" on the bottle, they are actually diluted), so look for good reviews. I've been using the Mason Natural Tea Tree Oil ($8) for a few years with good results.

Favorite Facial Oil/Anti-Aging Treatment: I love rosehip oil. It does all sorts of wonderful things for your skin, no matter what skin type you have. (Read more about it from Lab Muffin.) The only downside for me is that I have to avoid my eye area with it, or at least use it sparingly there, because my eyes don't like oils and again with the fucking milia. You also have to read reviews of this stuff, because the quality and potency will vary between brands. And make sure it doesn't smell like roses--it's not made from rose petals. In fact, it usually smells a bit like cooking oil. I've had good luck with the Aura Cacia Rosehip Oil ($7) and Life-Flo Rosehip Seed Oil ($6). You only need 2-3 drops for your entire face, so a bottle lasts a long time, at least until it spoils.

Favorite Mask: Hands down, Freeman Avocado and Oatmeal Clay Mask. Reviewed here. It really absorbs oil and helps to clear pores without drying out my skin. Love it, and it's $4 for a huge tube that never ends. I've tried more expensive clay masks. This is better.

Favorite Lip Balm: Palmer's Cocoa Butter Swivel Stick ($2-4). It looks like a glue stick, smells subtly like white chocolate, and keeps my lips super soft all winter. My favorite, forever. This enormous tube lasts a long time, as you can tell from my beat-up photo. Do not make the mistake of buying the teeny Palmer's lip balm with the sunscreen in it! That one is bitter and a fraction of the size for the same price. If you can't find the giant Swivel Stick with the other lip balms, look next to the Palmer products in the lotion section (or at Shopper's Drug Mart in Canada, sometimes it's with "ethnic hair care"). Or get it from drugstore.com for less than $3.

Favorite Hand Cream: I love, love, love Caldrea Hand Balm in the Ginger Pomelo scent. It's way better than the more expensive hand creams I've tried (ahem, L'Occitane), though it might be a tad splurgy at $10 a tube. But it smells amazing, and moisturizes extremely well while still absorbing quickly and not being greasy.

Favorite Foot Cream: O'Keeffe's Foot Cream ($5). Reviewed here. Put a very small amount on your feet before bed and they will be softened up significantly by morning. In a few days of using it, all the rough skin will be gone. It's really good. I don't recommend using it on hot and sweaty nights, because it has a slightly greasy feeling, and I think that's gross when I'm already sticky.

These are the best of the (cheap) best in my opinion, but I'd love to hear about any other affordable skin care you'd recommend--especially if you have a different skin type, since I can't really evaluate things that don't suit mine.

(Note: The title originally said "under $15," because when I started writing, I thought that the Simple moisturizer was over $10. But everything on the list can actually be found--in the U.S.--$10 or less. Excellent!)

BECCA up to 75% off on HauteLook

Disclosure: referral link.
I still haven't tried anything from Becca yet, but there is a lot of stuff in this sale. Foundations for $10, cream eyeliners for $8, eyeshadow quads for $10. Anything look good to you?

There's also a bunch of stuff from Spanx on HauteLook today, if you're into that.

Addendum to hyaluronic acid

Here is a quick note to add something important to my recent post on hyaluronic acid. (This is what happens when you try to write something at the tail end of bad cold.) I mainly said there that I like HA because it makes my skin feel nice and has potential for long term effects. True. But I forgot to add one of the immediate results it provides that I love. HA does an excellent job of combatting flakiness from dry skin or from products that cause it, such as the peeling you can get when you start using a powerful retinol product. Regular moisturizer never really cuts it for me under these conditions, but if I use something with HA after over-exfoliating or overdoing the retinol, it diminishes the flakiness significantly. Enough that I can wear foundation without weirdness caused by my makeup highlighting dryness. So that is something to consider as a more concrete benefit of HA.

Vampy Winter Lips for Beginners

Disclosure: Affiliate links.
The beginner I'm mainly referring to here is me. I know that some of you are seasoned vampy veterans, but I haven't historically been a huge lipstick wearer in general. I've even declared in writing that I was giving up on lipstick because it was too high maintenance. Instead, I wore every other type of lip product: stain, balm, tint, gloss, etc. But somehow, in the last year or so, I've got a lot more into lipstick. I don't know what happened. Bored with other types of makeup? Getting old and no longer as self conscious? At any rate, probably 80% or more of the makeup I've bought in the last 6-9 months (which hasn't been a lot) has been lipstick, and when I'm browsing it's usually the most appealing category to me lately.

Left to right: Revlon Balm Stain in Crush, Paula's Choice Plum, Bite Mulberry/Scarlet, Maybelline Creamy Matte Divine Wine, and Urban Decay Matte Bad Blood.

One new change that I've really only embraced this winter is dark or bold "vampy" lipstick. Now I am talking about vaguely vampy shades, nothing extreme. I'm still a beginner, and my coloring makes things look more dramatic than they might otherwise. There's nothing black (or blackish) in my lineup. The few lipsticks I have that could be categorized as vampy are mostly very pigmented berries or wines. Wet N Wild Sugar Plum Fairy (a supposed dupe for MAC Rebel) is sort of my baseline for comparison here. If you consider Sugar Plum Fairy or Rebel to be a "wearable berry" then you're probably going to roll your eyes at my whole weak foray into bold lipsticks. If, on the other hand, you find it slightly intimidatingly bold, I'll assume you're with me on this one. I'm not saying Rebel is vampy, but for me, anything darker than that is edging into vampy territory. It's my vampy watershed. Or something.

Here is my small collection of debatably vampy lip colors, with Wet N Wild Sugar Plum Fairy also swatched for comparison:

Why do they all look bright pink? Shitty winter light!

Left to right: Wet N Wild Sugar Plum Fairy, Revlon Balm Stain in Crush, Paula's Choice Plum, Bite Mulberry, Bite Scarlet, Maybelline Creamy Matte Divine Wine, and Urban Decay Matte Bad Blood.

I Heart Hyaluronic Acid

Disclosure: Affiliate links. Product provided free for review.
Okay, I'm back for real this time. A massively busy week was capped off with a nasty cold, which I am finally recovering from. The combination of those two things meant I had no brains left over for blogging. My apologies if you have left a comment around here recently and didn't get a response. This is why! Now I have a huge backlog of ideas (and photos), so I hope to get back into the swing of things.

I want to talk about a skincare ingredient that's become one of my favorites in the last couple of years: hyaluronic acid. It's something that occurs naturally in skin tissue, and it has healing properties. It also a extremely effective humectant, meaning that it has the ability to hold moisture. Apparently one gram of HA (hereafter, because I am likely to spell it wrong repeatedly, otherwise) can hold up to six litres of water. It has anti-oxidants and and helps with inflammation. It's basically unicorn magic, okay? I mean, science. Unicorn science. You can read more about it here.

I find it difficult to judge the long term results of skincare products most of the time, partly because I don't know what my skin would look like if I hadn't used them. But this stuff is promising in the long run, and it has short term effects that I really like. HA helps the skin feel smoother and softer. That's my favorite thing about it. When I apply a product with HA in it, my skin feels "really fucking nice," as I've said before.

Because HA is a humectant, that means it draws moisture from the environment. Ideally, it will draw moisture from the air and put it on your skin. But if the environment is so dry that your skin has more moisture in it than the air, it can actually draw moisture out of your skin. This fact probably explains why when I first tried a serum with HA in it, I wasn't impressed. I was living in an apartment where I couldn't control the heat, and it was always cranked all the way up. That winter it was regularly -30 outside, and I still had to crack my windows open in order to be comfortable. SO DRY. It's the same winter I tested the Neutrogena hand cream that is mostly glycerin--another humectant--and wasn't impressed. Yet when I travelled to Seattle for a weekend and used it there, suddenly it was more effective. So if you live in desert-like conditions, your results may not be spectacular. Otherwise, I recommend giving HA a shot.

My current HA is a Vitamin C serum (pictured above) from a company called Maple Holistics, who sent it to me, along with a shampoo and conditioner, for free. This is one of only two times I have ever been sent what could be termed "press samples." Now you know I'm not much for "natural" nonsense when it comes to skincare. Even weirder, Maple Holistics markets some of their beauty products as "homeopathic," which . . . I'm not even going to get into that. What could that even mean? But the proof is in the ingredients, I think. The Maple Holistics Vitamin C Anti-Aging Serum ingredients list looks like this:

Water, Vitamin C (Sodium Ascorbyl Phosphate) 10%, Vegetable Glycerin, Hyaluronic Acid, Aloe Barbadensis Leaf, Vitamin E Acetate, Retinyl Palmitate, Algae Extract, Pullulan Xanthum Gum, Hydroxyethylcellulose, Caprylhydroxamic Acid, Glyceryl Caprylate

Looks good! I actually can't really say much about this stuff as a Vitamin C serum. I've never had much luck with Vit C in skincare. Either it doesn't do anything for me, or I just don't have the issues it's meant to help with (my skin is already "bright," etc.). Plus, the first ingredient is water, and Vitamin C works better in formulas without water. However, ignoring that, this is great as a HA product. I smooth on a few drops in the morning, and my skin feels lovely. You can see from the photo above that I've almost finished my bottle. I've been using it since about September, 4-5 times a week, so I've tested it pretty thoroughly.

At under $12 for an ounce of product, it's not a bad price, either. In fact, you can test it out for free in return for an Amazon review (info here). Amazon is actually a decent source for products with HA in them. There are a lot of smaller companies out there selling stuff like this. The potential downside is that a lot of them trade free product for reviews, and even though they specifically request "honest" reviews, most people seem to be paranoid that a negative review will mean no more free stuff. (I hope you can trust that I am not one of those people, because I have amassed very little free stuff after years of negative reviews here. Which maybe means that concern is not so paranoid . . . ) Anyway, I would advise caution when looking at the options available on Amazon. Maybe assume the ratings are inflated or at least read the reviews with fewer stars.

If you don't want to venture into uncharted (or weirdly-charted) Amazon territory, there are HA options from more mainstream brands. For example, I recently read good things from auxiliary beauty about CeraVe's PM Facial Moisturizing Lotion, which contains HA. It costs about $13 for 3 oz. and contains other good things like niacinamide and ceramides. That seems like a particularly affordable option. If you want something separate from a moisturizer, there's the Paula's Choice Ultra-Light Super Antioxidant Serum (that I reviewed before), which has a bunch of other promising ingredients. Not cheap, though. Or if you have a regimen that you already like and just want to add HA to it, there's Paula's Choice Hyaluronic Acid Booster (damn, I had to spell it again), which allows you just to add some drops to whatever product you're already using. I've tried it and it seemed effective. It's also not cheap, but it should last a long time, since you only use a couple of drops at a time.

Whatever source you get it from, I do recommend giving a product with hyaluronic acid a try. It combines making your skin feel awesome immediately with (probably?) having excellent long term effects.

ADDENDUM: Please see this additional short post about another benefit of HA.

Anyone else a big fan of this stuff? Are there other good (affordable) sources of HA out there that you've tried?