Is the need to use mascara basically just built around marketing?

We speak to three beauty brands to find out what they did to ensure the best kind of buzz around their product offerings

As a beauty editor, I’ve tried a lot of mascaras across the spectrum. I like Too Faced Better Than Sex (a thickening, lengthening formula that rings in at ₹ 2,100), Maybelline New York The Colossal (a drugstore favourite that lengthens at just ₹ 449) and the Sisley Paris So Curl Mascara (a true luxury product with a ₹ 6,000 price tag), and I like them all equally. If I had to close my eyes and pick just one of these from my kit to use, I’d be happy to pick out any one of the three. This can’t be said about blushes, lipsticks or foundations—I would definitely know the difference between the Charlotte Tilbury Magic Foundation and a random drugstore find. On the surface, mascara doesn’t seem all that innovative. But when you compare it to other products—which have cool textures and delivery methods and shade ranges and dramatic before/afters—a mascara just feels like a tube of black goo that does its job. 

But brands won’t agree—they spend a lot of time on research and development, marketing and product positioning in the mascara category, and are still trying to come up with the best and coolest tubes to give you longer, stronger, more voluminous and curled lashes in the process. When MAC launched the MACStack mascara this year, it was being lauded as the biggest innovation that the brand had done in that year, with the product development said to have taken more than two years. The mascara’s claim to fame is its buildability—you can stack coat after coat and the formula just won’t clump. Beauty editors and influencers on social media found this to be true, and a million five-star reviews later, the mascara was the number-one selling mascara in its first week at ULTA Beauty, where it sold out. This brings to focus the main question: Was it the marketing or was it the actual product formula?

We spoke to three beauty brands about how they launched their best-selling mascaras, and what they did to ensure that it built up the best buzz.

How do brands make formula decisions?

FAE Beauty launched BRASH (Brow+Lash), which they claim is the only dual brow gel and mascara in India. It is a lengthening mascara, formulated with microfibres that attach to your lashes for extra length, and build up your brows to make them appear more naturally full and fluffy while ensuring they stay in place all day. But how did the brand know what their consumers even wanted? They asked them directly. The concept for the product came to them from a detailed customer survey they conducted, where over 150 participants educated them about their behaviour, preferences, likes and dislikes when it came to mascara.

“Our survey told us that large groups of people were actually using their wands from dried-up mascara to comb through their lashes to add a little more body, and little more colour and a little more definition. Many did this because it was an easy or a lazy hack, while most others did it because it was cost-effective—they didn't need to invest in a brow gel in addition to a mascara, which tends to be a product on the pricier side, to begin with,” says Karishma Kewalramani, founder of FAE Beauty. This insight led to the development of Brash—a hybrid mascara-plus-brow gel formula that worked well to add length to lashes and volume to brows. “It was critical to ensure the formula did not make lashes or brows super crunchy (as a lot of traditional mascaras do) so that users felt comfortable wearing it on their brows,” she says. 

“When it comes to the wand, once again, our priority was the duality of use, so we created a wand that had short bristles on one side so that it could get the product into the lashes close to the waterline, and long bristles on the other side, so that it could effectively fluff, fill and set the brows. We chose to develop a silicone wand to ensure that it doesn't pick up an excess of product. Users, then, have the ability to control how much they want to fill in their brows—something that was a pain point with consumers who were using dried-up mascara wands,” explains Kewalramani.

It all starts with establishing what the need is, and then finding the best way to meet it. While FAE tried to create an all-in-one product, SUGAR Cosmetics felt like their consumers were very specific in terms of what they wanted. Hence it made the most sense for them to create mascaras with different USPs—The Lash Of The Titans Volumizing Mascara focuses on creating more volume; the Uptown Curl Lengthening Mascara lengthens and curls lashes to make them appear fluttery; and the Double Date Extreme Volume Mascara Duo gives you a 360-degree approach, thanks to bristles that lift at the root and a formula that strengthens and nourishes.
The idea, essentially, was to create a SUGAR mascara for any end goal you might have, says Mamta Naik, Associate vice-president, SUGAR Cosmetics.

For Anastasia Beverly Hills–a brand known for their brow and eye make-up–coming up with a great mascara was a key anchor product. They launched Lash Brag, a volumising mascara for people with short, thin or sparse lashes in 2020. The major selling point? “It has a specially designed hourglass-shaped brush that delivers the perfect amount of product onto each lash with buildable volume and length,” says Medhavi Nain, head of marketing, Anastasia Beverly Hills India. 

What does marketing look like?

However, while there are some nuances when it comes to the design and formula for mascara, it does simply feel like it’s just black goo in a tube. Marketing is the only way that a brand can cut through the noise. For some, that looks like using eye-catching ingredients—for instance, Benefit highlighted their super light-weight aeroparticles in their campaign for the Bad Gal Bang mascara, while others use titillating language (‘Better Than Sex,’ anyone?). Still others focused on how many iterations it took to get to the final product; Glossier Lash Slick was said to have gone through 248 tries to get to the final one. 

Kewalramani says that for FAE, marketing was challenging because the brand was essentially creating a new product category. “We spent a lot of time educating our consumers about the best way to use the product and the key USP we always focused on was the versatility the dual-function product offered while still remaining incredibly effective,” she says. They achieved this through videos, photos and social media collaborations. 

Meanwhile, Naik says that SUGAR Cosmetics focused on the premise that they were giving their customers a lot of choices so they could pick their favourite one according to their goals. “The USP of each of our mascaras is that they have not only been organically picked up through a large pool of digital beauty influencers but also pushed through educational short-format videos via owned, earned and paid digital platforms. This rich content is further amplified through in-store visual merchandising and retail marketing across the brand’s physical outlets,” she says. 

According to Nain, a video by a beauty influencer showcasing the product while educating the consumer about the main benefits is key. But what really makes a difference is the before and after pictures—how do the lashes actually look after you’ve applied the product? It’s all in the way this is portrayed. And no, applying mascara on lash extensions or falsies won’t do. All three brands make it clear that their consumers would know in an instant, and if a picture is worth a thousand words here, the trust in the way the picture is taken makes all the difference. 

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