Mascara Monday: Maybelline Great Lash BIG Mascara

Maybelline's Great Lash BIG mascara is a step up from the original Great Lash mascara, the main difference is the brush is much larger. I know this mascara is listed as a favourite in many beauty magazines, but I never understood why because personally I hated the original, it was one of the worst mascara I've ever tried. I purchased the Great Lash BIG recently primarily for review purposes, it was $3.97 CAD at my Walmart, mascara does not much cheaper than that. This one promises "bigger brush, bigger lashes, buildable volume" (compared to the original Great Lash).

The outer packaging is much the same. My first gripe with this is the pink and green packaging looks really cheap, even the sticker with the name on it is peeling off, why wouldn't they imprint the tube with the name instead of a crappy sticker? It screams cheap to me. I am tempted to just take the sticker off, but everyone would still know it's Great Lash that I am using anyway. This one is also a washable formula, meaning it comes off with water alone, does that impress me? Not at all, I always wash my makeup off with makeup remover anyway, it takes my eyeshadow and mascara off in one step.

Now onto the brush. Big difference right? Can we even call the original Great Lash mascara a mascara brush? Look at how small and wimpy that thing is! The brush looks promising at first I think. It's just a traditional wired bristle wand, but it looks quite full and soft. I guess at the time this first came out, this brush was considered large, but many mascara companies make brushes of this size now, so it's not as unexpected anymore. I have this in the colour "Very Black". I find that because the tube opening is so large, I get excess mascara grim building up in there and since the tube is pink, it is very obvious, if they made it black it wouldn't be so dirty looking.

This smeared badly on my top lash line, I have this happen sometimes, but it happened a lot with this one (see third picture above). It gave very minimal volume and length, not even worth writing about, it did nothing for my lashes. The formulation is very thin and light, you would assume it could be layered because of this, but when I attempted to, it gave me spidery lashes. It made my lashes look really unhealthy and nasty. Once you've used a lot of mascaras, it is easy to tell a bad one from a good one right away and this stuff is bad bad bad.

While this mascara isn't great, it's a small improvement from the last one which was a terrible disaster in my opinion. I would only recommend Great Lash BIG to young girls who are just started out with mascaras because it is very basic and simple, and it's cheap too. If you've tried a lot of mascaras, this will be nothing for you because it is at the bottom of the totem pole of mascaras, all it will do is give you a very minimal natural look, like darkening your lashes in my opinion.

Have you tried Maybelline Great Lash BIG? What did you think?