NEW Must-Have: Code Beautiful Mascara

The hunt for the perfect mascara causes women across the world hours of misery and hundreds of pounds a year. On average, a women spends over £2000 on mascara in her lifetime - I bet you Cheryl Cole's lashes that at least 50% of those mascara tubes remain unfinished because they don't provide the length/volume/lift that was promised. I for one have, at any one time, around 20 mascaras floating around my makeup box in various states of use. Once I find a goodun it stays with me for as long as I can get some gloop out of the bottle, before I have to hot-foot it down to Harvey Nicols and grab myself another. The ultimate mascara was a dream of two ladies who'd spend years trying to find the perfect product; after their search failed, they decided to bite the bullet and create their very own. After a year of playing, testing, tweaking and perfecting, they developed a mascara that claims to provide fabulous lash lift, length and volume, as well as being smudge proof, tear proof and paraben free. If that wasn't enough, Code Beautiful mascara also contains vitamins and waxes that encourage lash growth, so you can be looking after your flutter in both the short and long term in one swoop. When I first received a sample of this to try I was extremely skeptical - how could one mascara provide all of that and not be developed in some posh L'Oreal lab? To make matters worse, the packaging was pretty blah and the brush looked like it came free with my 1997 copy of Sugar Magazine. Things were not looking great, but appearances in beauty can be very deceptive. Once I actually tried this not-so-pretty mascara I was pleasantly surprised - it applied well, it separated my lashes, it provided length and didn't clump. Code Beautiful mascara allows you to build up the mascara for a fuller look and extreme volume, with no clumping whatsoever; the more I used it, the more I decided I really did quite like it. While chatting away to one of the brand owners, I noted the pretty ugly looking brush... Apparently this is something they were told in research, but no other brush worked in the way they wanted. We're so used to seeing ergonomic and technologically advanced mascara wands, that going back to basics seems a little strange - maybe more cosmetic brands should adopt this strategy, rather than selling us posh looking wands that are about as much use as a chopstick. I've been using this mascara for a few weeks now and it's definitely become my default - it provides the seperation and length I require in the day, the volume I love and night and the staying power to last a weekend walking around in rainy London. Of all the mascaras I've used this year, this is second only to the YSL Babydoll which is £4.00 more expensive. Not bad for a first shot at the cosmetics market from a pair of savvy women who just couldn't find what they were after.