Oh mascaras, the bane of my make up life.

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Finding a good mascara is so difficult.

If you haven’t caught one of my mascara reviews before I struggle to find a good mascara because I have oily lids but dry eyes. There’s therefore a lot of opportunities for my mascara to run and give me lovely panda eyes.

I finally discovered tubing mascara but finding one that is problem-free has been tough.

What are tubing mascaras?

If you’ve never heard of one before, they’re a mascara that coats the lashes with a water resistant ‘tube’. But they don’t smudge or smear. To make it even better, they don’t need any fancy products to remove, just hot water. It has to be hot though.

Since discovering these kinds of mascaras my Alice Cooper-esque days have reduced greatly. Normal waterproof or smudge-proof mascaras just aren’t good enough for my tricky eyes.

I’ve tried a few over the past couple of years on my K Beauty journey from Tony Moly, Isehan and Heimish (click each for the reviews).

But I still hadn’t found ‘the one’.

On a whim, I decided to order this from Etude House, called Curl Fix!*

This mascara came with bold claims of curling your lashes for 24 hours! It also claims to curl every lash without clumping using the ‘C’ shaped brush.

It also claims that there will be zero smudging.

I was super excited to try this!

However, the first time I opened this up I was a little disappointed. There was so much product on the wand, it was reminiscent of the Heimish mascara I tried last.

It’s kind of hard to see in the picture, but hopefully you can see at the top of the wand how much product is on there.

It takes some work to scrape all that excess off before I can use it. If I don’t get that excess of, the application is very clumpy and I find myself having to go in with some cotton buds and a spoolie to try and take the excess product off.

If I can get the right amount of product on however, the application is great. My lashes are separated, lengthened and slightly curled. My lashes don’t fully curl without an eyelash curler, so I wasn’t expecting the kind of curling results Etude House claimed. However, I was really happy with the result.

As promised, it lasted the day without smudging.

The only days when I got a little bit smudging under the eyes were really hot summer days when I was in either a hot office or spent all day outside. It was however minor, and it didn’t put me off the mascara at all.

Removal was really easy. As expected, just some hot water got rid of it easily. It was substantially easier to remove than the Hemish mascara.

My new favourite mascara, right?

Wrong. Despite all of the above I found something with this mascara that I haven’t with any of the others I’ve tried. After a few weeks of use it irritated my eyes. As soon as I put this mascara on, my left eye would get slightly itchy/stingy and that would continue throughout the day. To ensure it isn’t just my eyes I’ve been swapping this out with the Isehan mascara and the Heimish and I don’t have the same with either of those products.

When I look this up on COSDNA there’s actually no ingredients highlighted as an irritant. What’s even stranger is that when I look up the Isehan and the Tony Moly mascaras (the Heimish one isn’t on there) both of those has ingredients listed as irritants.

So I’ve no idea why or what is causing it, but there’s something in this mascara that my contact lense wearing eyes does not like.

It’s a shame as I actually really liked this mascara.

As long as I wiped off enough excess product, the application and results were great. But irritation of the eyes is a deal breaker for me. It didn’t happen from the beginning of the tube, so maybe it goes off quicker than most mascaras? Either way, this won’t be a product I won’t be repurchasing.

Back to my search, I guess?