Hi-Tech Mascara Wands

Last week in Monaco at Luxe Pack , a packaging exhibition for top-of-the-line (read: very expensive) luxe beauty brands, the newest innovation in beauty tools was introduced: Revolution, the rotating mascara wand.

Alcan Packaging Beauty, a company specializing in mascara wands for the past 30 years, unveiled their rotating wand to great fanfare at the exhibit. The electric wand picks up mascara in one swoop from the tube and then rotates itself to apply the product to the lashes. It employs a silent motor and batteries to accomplish this feat. Alcan execs stressed that this wand is not to be confused with the previously released vibrating mascara wand, which proved useless to most women.

My question here is why do we need beauty products with moving parts? Have women in mass complained about the difficulty of twisting their wrists to apply mascara?

Luxury beauty brands continually seek ways to separate their products from the more “pedestrian” items found in mainstream retail outlets. Gimmicky packaging and turbo marketing are ways these brands stay on top. They work hard to associate cache with their products. This cache usually costs consumers $18 – $30 per mascara tube, compared to $6-$9 for brands in drugstores.

Paying premium for products that offer superior performance or healthier ingredients (synthetic and chemical fillers are often cheaper than healthy options) is fine. Paying for unnecessary packaging (or as one department store call it, “experience branding”) is a waste of money, in my opinion.

Michel Limongi, creative director at Alcan Packaging Beauty said this: “Although mascara is not a particularly difficult product to work with, we often find that consumers are expecting miracles!”

Hmmm. I don’t know. I only expect my lashes to be black. And for the product to stay on my lashes till the end of the day. Mascara just isn’t a place where I need miracles. But maybe that’s just me.

What are you expecting from your mascara? Please share. I’d love to hear it.