DiorShow: Saving The Polar Bears

Beauty editors are not known for their subtlety.

I can't recall ever opening a magazine to the makeup section and reading about "mediocre" mascara or "adequate" foundation.

No, the beauty pages constitute a strange world where perfume smells like adjectives, where the perfect shade of blush could give Drew Carey cheekbones, and a swipe of gloss can double your lip size. I tend to read the beauty pages with the same mistrust and obtuse enjoyment as I do The Weekly World News--"Batboy found in cave!" "Chanel's $350 face cream is totally worth it!" See? Same deal.

So when I read, oh, I don't know, 20,000 reviews of Dior's new DiorShow mascara that said it was so perfect and lash-plumping that it had brought peace to the middle east, I was skeptical.
After all, these were the same people who promised Three Easy Steps to Charlize Theron's Skin, and that sure as hell didn't work. But I couldn't help but take notice of the DiorShow epidemic: It seemed that within a two-week time period, every beauty editor and makeup blogger on earth had become a passionate convert, a born-again big-lashed preacher singin' the praises of life-changing mascara.

So I bought it. And I tried it. And I decided that I want to be a beauty editor.


To put it simply: this stuff fuckin' rocks. To put it beauty editorly: This stuff could save the polar bears.

When I first bought a tube of my previously favorite mascara, MAC Fibre Rich (which I still recommend, by the way), the drag queen behind the counter told me, "the brush kind of looks like a cat chewed on it, but it works really well." He was right on both counts.

When I first opened my new tube of DiorShow, I found that the brush was as big as a cat. A large cat. Therefore, my first few applications ended up looking less like lush lashes and more like a poor attempt at blackface. After a few tries though, I was a pro, and I seriously stared at my new, big-lashed self in the mirror for twenty minutes, thinking, "My little blond lashes can look like this?? Where have you been all my life?"

Some of the reviews I read had included dire warnings, like,"Beware of using DiorShow during the day, because your lashes will be too dramatic. Stick with night-time use only." I guess they were going for a "With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" thing, but I've always felt that lashes could never be too dramatic. Still, I get a bit of a rebellious rush every morning when I put it on and watch my lashes expand to apparently unacceptable proportions.

"Gawd," I imagine my eyelashes saying, "I can just look at a tube of DiorShow and gain 10 pounds."

And when your mascara makes you think your eyelashes can make bad jokes, well, that's when you know it's really working.