REVIEWSDAY: Maybelline Brow Drama Sculpting Brow Mascara

I can't decide whether my horrific brow situation makes me more or less qualified to review brow products. On the one hand, why would you take my advice when my eyebrows look so scruffy/wonky/pathetic? On the other hand, any brow product I use really has a tough job on its hands, so any I recommend must be pretty damn amazing. Sadly this is not quite that, but at the same time it's not awful, and I hope it will help me a little bit on my way to Emma Watson eyebrows (the dream). Take that Cara.

As I have banged on about a fair bit, I am trying to grow my eyebrows out a bit, because they are super patchy from horrendous overplucking when I was younger, and quite thin, and I plucked them into wonkiness. Apparently, however, brows take up to six months to regrow, so for now I am pretty much not touching the tweezers (I take out the super extreme stragglers once a week, but I am very tough on myself), but I have quite a situation on my hands day-to-day. I have lots of gaps I need to fill in, which I do with eyeshadow at the moment, but that can look quite fake, so I was looking for something that might beef them up a bit more naturally, and act as a little bit of a brush and setting gel. Step in brow mascara.

There are a few on the market at the moment, but I generally quite like Maybelline and had read good things about their other new eyebrow product, the Maybelline Brow Satin Smoothing Gel Pen and Filling Powder Duo (what a mouthful!) so I picked this up as part of a Superdrug 3 for 2.

The packaging is quite nice, though as a rule I'm generally not hugely bothered about that, especially if it won't even be going in my handbag. Opening up the tube, I was quite surprised by the brush - I was expecting essentially a diddy mascara brush because that's what I had seen from other brands, but it is actually ball-shaped. I'm not quite sure what their reasoning is for this, because this is definitely my biggest problem with it. Although it does coat my eyebrow hairs quite well, it also coats all surrounding skin pretty well too, and I don't think it works so well to brush them into place either. I do actually sometimes use the end of the ball to dab colour on any gaps of skin, but I really should buy an eyebrow pencil for this (I have heard good things about Soap & Glory's Brow Archery).

The colour (Medium Brown) is actually really great on me, it is pretty much bang on what I want. My eyebrows are quite ashy, but because of having warm-ish red hair, I like something on my brows that tends a little bit warmer to match my hair better (helpfully I didn't think of including my hair in the photos, sorry!). You can see though in the pictures that the after picture (below) it doesn't actually look like I have anything on, it just looks a bit fuller than the before picture above, so in this sense it is great. It also makes me think that probably if your brows are reasonably even and well-shaped, this would be perfect at boosting them and then setting in place. Equally, if I can find a good pencil to fill in the gaps, this would probably be good at finishing them off. Because of the colour match, I am definitely considering getting the pencil-powder duo version of this, but I am also tempted by Brow Archery - any recommendations on which I should get??

So in general, has this converted me to the idea of brow mascaras? Definitely. Will I be buying this one again? Probably not. Will I be looking for other brands? Probably yes. I think next I will be plumping (sorry not sorry for the pun) for L'Oreal Brow Artist Plumper, which has the mini brush I expected just so I can avoid getting it all over my face. So sorry Maybelline, but at least I am forever loyal to the Color Drama lip pencils.