L’oreal is a brand that is synonymous with great quality products at affordable prices. Some of their mascaras are my my all time favourites so I was more than excited to see The Miss Manga Mega Volume mascara in my little stash of goodies from the Priceline Beauty Click program.

Ive had the chance to wear it a few times now and have formed a couple of opinions about this mascara. Ill let you know now that this is probably a product that I won’t be repurchasing simply because I’m not a fan of the design of the wand. While the mascara did fulfil its promises of more volume, plus quite a bit of length the brush left a little to be desired for me personally.

The formula of this product is great! Its super black, doesn’t smudge or flake throughout the day and was easily removed with either micellular water or an oil based makeup remover.  I often experience smudging “panda eyes” at the end of a day with some mascaras but didn’t experience that with this product.

The mascara certainly added a lot of volume and length to my short but plentiful lashes. The problem was that the wand created almost instant clumping and “spider leg” lashes for me.  My lashes stuck together and formed clumps with just one coat. In the photo above you’ll see voluminous lashes with some clumping. This was after I removed most of the excess product from the wand, applied one good coat and then went in with some tweezers to remove some of the clumping and to help with a little separation.

The second photograph shows what my lashes look like after  removing the excess product on a tissue and then applying the mascara. My lashes are weighed down with product and are looking all together spidery.

I believe that the main reason for my clumping problem is this wand, while i love the tapered end of the brush the amount of product that comes out on the wand is ridiculous!  Each time i took the wand out of the tube there was so much product flooded in the bristles that i needed to spend quite a bit of time dabbing it with a tissue and wasting an insane amount of the mascara. The neck of the tube doesn’t really do much to scrape product off the wand.  This is not a problem if you have plenty of time in the morning when applying your face, but for me, when I’m already ten minutes late (i.e. every day) I just don’t have time or the patience for this.

 So why not scrape some of this back into the tube? This mascara boasts a flexible wand which helps you to get into all those hard to reach lashes. The problem is however, that the fact that the wand is very flexible means that its almost impossible to apply any proper pressure to effectively scrape it against anything. The wand just “gives” and wobbles about so you can’t really successfully scrape the excess off

The flexible wand also meant that i couldn’t really apply enough pressure to the lashes to help comb and separate through them thus creating the spidery lashes. The slightest amount of pressure meant that the wand gave way and bent at the little elbow which is just above the brush