Failed Experiment: Activated Charcoal and Vegetable Glycerin Mascara

There are times when, as much as I appreciate their message, I find ReadyMade's projects to be a touch inaccessible or impractical. They involve steps like, "Find a friend who is a metalsmith and have him or her weld all of these 1950s mid-century modern metal chairs to one another to create a chair-bench to meet all of your airport-esque seating requirements!"

But this one is right up my alley. Simple ingredients, no metalsmithing, plus makeup. Bingo.

The materials:

• Activated charcoal capsules
• Aloe vera
• A clean mascara wand

The instructions:

1. Empty an activated charcoal capsule into a small bowl.
2. Put in ¼ tsp pure aloe vera gel and mix.
3. Using an old (but thoroughly cleaned) mascara wand, sweep it onto your lashes. Make and use (don’t store) as needed.

Mascara can be pretty expensive, plus there are all sorts of shifty ingredients I am not terribly keen on putting near my eye-zone. The Cosmetic Safety Database has succeeded in cementing my paranoia about commercially-produced beauty products.

However, since I couldn't find aloe vera gel that didn't look like it came out of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle after eating a bunch of lime jello, I tried to use vegetable glycerin as a base. It looked promising, but it just turned into big black droplets on my eyelashes and 6 hours later, it's still smearing when I touch it.

This would probably work just fine if I actually followed the instructions. I believe we have an aloe plant around here somewhere, so I can probably get some non-TMNT aloe if I look hard enough and see if that fixes the goop issue. "Hexxus from Fern Gully just sneezed on my eyeballs" is not a good look for me.