Eyes wide open

BEAUTY:IT'S BEING called the mascara wars. Beauty giants Lançome and Estée Lauder have been crossing wands in the battle to get their battery-operated mascara to counters.

But does the fact that your mascara is battery operated mean it performs more efficiently, or is it just another gimmicky beauty business marketing tool?

Lancome's Ôscillation mascara features a miniaturised motor, 3cm in size, and is powered by a removable and recyclable battery for optimal brush use. Lancome performs no fewer than 7,000 vibrations per minute for "perfect formula application, perfect 360 degree coating around each and every lash".

The TurboLash All Effects Motion Mascara, by Estée Lauder, is also powered by a button cell battery. The micropulses of the LashSonic Brush oscillate at 125-cycles per second, or 7,500 vibrations per minute, making it slightly more powerful than its competitor.

It was a vibrating razor that first got one of Estée Lauder's two mascara men, George Kress, vice-president of corporate package innovations, thinking: "I was intrigued with the concept of a static machine - how the machine causes your hair to stand up on end as you place your hand on it - and I was trying to figure out a way to apply that concept to a mascara to make lashes pop."

The other mascara man, Paul Marotta, group leader of Makeup Research and Development at Estée Lauder, focused on building a mascara gel formula that would work in sync with Kress's technology.

Does it work? Both promise to create a fringe effect on your lashes, which is very a/w 2008. A waiting list of 300 plus individuals at the Estee Lauder counter at Harrods speaks volumes (pun intended) and Beautymaverick.com, a blog written by a former cosmetics publicist, referred to the Lancôme version as "possibly the iPhone 3G of the beauty realm".