Hestia....what pink eyes you've got!

Check out my pink eyes! Say nothing about my big ears though

So I thought I'd do a light-hearted blog about mascaras - try to give these excellent make-up bloggers that I love a run for their shekels.  Something witty and informative that involved wearing each of my mascaras for a day and probing the following important areas:

1 - Does it do what the advertising schmaltz claims that it will?  Am I thicker? longer? Better than falsies?
2 - Does it make my eyes itchy by 5pm?
3 - How much comes off when you cry at the NSPCC advert or Who Do You Think You Are?
4 - Ease of removal at night
5 - Do you have panda eyes in the morning?

As you can see, it would have been a hugely important blog post in the entire history of blogging - possibly even an award winner that would prompt a change of career and a magazine column advising about matt, gloss or eggshell finishes on one's lipstick.  Tom Ford, all you need to do is call me..... yeah, well, I'm prone to day dreaming as you can see.

Right - to the test. I'm as tough as old boots and I click my fingers in distain at 'sell-by' dates and 'best before' dates.  Sure, it means that I have a cupboard full of medicines that either make your bowels move or cork you up like Bolly under pressure, but hey - it's all just baloney to make you buy more new unnecessary stuff.  Like fresh food.

I ignored the 'discard by' info on my regular mascara and slapped on a couple of coats of something inexpensive and pretty clumpy. Sitting in front of the computer, I soon found myself rubbing at my eyes.  Didn't think it was the mascara though, because I'd put on eyeliner today too - and plus, I'd worn the mascara loads of times before without incident. The rubbing became more frantic and my eyes started to get really sore, not itchy.

By 10am I was trying to claw my eyeballs out of their sockets and rinsing every few minutes with Optrex.  I peered at myself in the bathroom mirror - my eyes had puffed up like marshmallows. The pink ones. It was not a good look.  It was time to phone the doctor.

Within 30 minutes, I was sitting in the waiting room to see Dr Hugely Over-Paid.  My eyes were streaming and I prayed that I wouldn't have long to wait.  The Olympians smiled upon me and within a couple of minutes, Hugely came out and called me through.

It only took a couple of minutes for him to diagnose that my mascara had caused my eye problems. 

'How old IS the mascara, exactly?' asked Dr Hugely. 

I shrugged, embarassed.  'Dunno, but the writing on the package is in Latin.'

He cracked his handsome ski-tanned face into a smile and dripped some soothing drops into my poor eyes.  He then wrote me a script for ointment - no driving until the situation had improved.  That suited me fine because I didn't think that I could see to find the GARAGE, never mind the car's ignition.

By 11am I was back home gratefully clutching my prescription and fighting the urge to get on to Twitter for a chat - albeit a hugely painful one.  Hell, I even had to leave our Tarot e-zine languishing in QuarkXpress for a whole nother day before I could face the torture of a bright screen and 37 pages of setting and editing.

What I *DID* do instead was go upstairs and clear out my mascaras and wash all my make-up brushes.  Do you know, some of the brushes were actually an entirely different colour to what I thought they were?

So, since I cannot be a shining example to you of good make-up care, let me be a horrible pink-eyed, puffy faced warning instead:  bin your old mascaras before you too resemble a pesky wabbit....

So, fess up - is it only me who keeps ancient make-up and rarely washes her make-up brushes?

*waits nervously* Will Hestia be alone in adding 'make-up bag strumpet' to her growing hash-tag list of domestic goddess fails?