Maybelline Illegal Lengths Mascara Review (& a personal revelation about Fiber Mascaras)

I've been dragging my ass on this review for Maybelline Illegal Lengths Mascara because I was trying to figure out a way I could use this and love it, but I just couldn't :(  Maybelline has worked up a good reputation with me when it comes to their mascaras so I figured I could somehow make it work for me if I just kept at it.  One thing that I did get out of this was a revelation that will probably save me a lot of money in the future though.  Find out what that revelation was and a full review on the mascara after the jump!

Illegal Lengths has been promoted as a fiber mascara meant to lengthen the crap out of our scrawny lashes.  The first thing that struck me about Illegal Lengths though was how similar it was to Maybelline Lash Stiletto in regards to packaging.

As you can see here, aside from the colors and name printed on the tubes the packaging is exactly the same.  So I opened up the tubes to compare the brushes:

Lash Stiletto (top) & Illegal Lengths (bottom)

Now, I know I'm blind as a bat, but these two brushes look EXACTLY the same.  This had me hopeful though because Lash Stiletto has been one of my favorite mascaras for at least 4 years now.  I figured that Illegal Lengths would be like Lash Stiletto but with an extra oomph of lengthening so I was psyched to try it out.


Unfortunately the formula gave me a pretty bad case of the spider lashes the first few times I used it...womp, womp.  I tried using it alone, on top of other mascaras, on the bottom of other mascaras, 1 layer, 2 layers, nothing worked.  But of course when I went to photo the results for this blog post the mascara came out a lot better so you'll probably think I'm lying but I swear to you every other time it makes my lashes look scraggly and gross. 


So here's 1 coat of Illegal Lengths followed by 1 coat of Lash Stiletto for comparison.

Maybelline Illegal Lengths - 1 coat

Maybelline Lash Stiletto - 1 coat

With just 1 coat, nothing to exciting or disappointing for either one at this point.  You may notice that Lash Stiletto maintained the curl in my lashes a bit better and looks a bit more like just plain lashes sans mascara.    But it seems that Illegal Lengths is blacker and does add a little more length.

Maybelline Illegal Lengths - 2 coats

Maybelline Lash Stiletto - 2 coats

Once again, I had more length with Illegal Lengths and more curl with Lash Stiletto with the second coat. And as I mentioned before, Illegal Lengths behaved much better during this trial than it normally does so in the photo above the lashes don't look bad at all.  But if you look really closely you can see how the fibers tend to ball a bit in different places and form little clumpies.  And if you multiply them my about 100 that's what it normally looks like on me.  For such an anal person like me those dumb fibers drive me crazy.  It would be one thing if they just looked like extensions of our natural lashes, but they looked all jagged going off in different directions and what not.  


Bottom Line:  Amber...wishes she could return this :(


Looking back in my mascara history, I realized that I haven't been a fan of any of the fiber mascaras I've tried before, for pretty much the same reason I didn't like Illegal Lengths.  I hate the look of scraggly lashes and they feel so uncomfortable, like my lashes are tangled or something. 


I did come across an article last week on how to properly apply fiber mascara so maybe I'm just not doing it right.  However I'm simply not willing to take the extra time and effort to fool around with them when I know I can get better results with a normal mascara that isn't so high maintenanced.


Are you a fan of fiber mascaras?