As a redhead with woefully blonde eyelashes, mascara is without a doubt my absolute essential make-up product. I never wear eyeshadow or foundation and only occasionally wear lipstick, but am rarely caught without my mascara on as I much prefer my eyes to look more defined and open. My eyelashes themselves are very long and I'd say reasonably curled, it's just that I can't see them - so I don't particularly look for a lengthening effect, just something to give lots of volume and colour them in so you can actually tell they're there! I'm also a contact lens wearer so ideally I like a product that won't disintegrate into loads of tiny flakes which then get stuck under the lens and cause ultimate pain all day.

I've recently been going through a phase of testing various mascaras and Estée Lauder Sumptuous Lifting Bold Volume Mascara was one of those I tried out. Estée Lauder is an American high-end makeup and cosmetics company which can be found just about everywhere - it's been going since 1946 and now sell their products all over the world in most major department stores.

PROMISES AND PACKAGING

I had high hopes for this one: it won Best Mascara in Cosmopolitan Beauty Awards 2009 and I've quite liked other Estée Lauder mascaras in the past, so I was eager to try it. It's marketed being able to "lift each lash with big, bold, weightless volume", which of course is a load of marketing speak, but still, I liked the sound of big and bold volume! Apparently, the formula has "ultra light, lash-thickening fibres" which also sounds good - I'm not a fan of heavy, clogging mascaras which feel like you've got dead weights on each lash.

So what does it look like? It comes in Estée Lauder's fairly traditional packaging: a long gold tube containing a wand brush, with the logo and the name of the mascara in black writing on the side of the tube. It's all packaged in a navy cardboard tube. The whole effect looks nice enough but isn't particularly modern, innovative or interesting; I've always had an impression of Estée Lauder as a traditional, somewhat "older person's" company and the packaging does nothing to dispel that. Certainly this mascara feels like a higher-end product and the overall effect is luxurious, but perhaps a little staid and unexciting.

THE BRUSH

Well, according to Estée Lauder, Sumptuous Lifting Bold Volume Mascara features a BrushComber which "thickens like a brush and defines like a comb". I thought it was actually a pretty bog-standard mascara brush, if I'm honest. It's tapered and much fatter towards the base and thinner towards the end, which is a very nice touch as it makes it easier to coat the little lashes at the corners of my eyes; it dunks in the tube well and doesn't lose all the mascara when it's pulled out, plus it doesn't seem to grab as much product on the end as some other brushes, but apart from that it's not so innovative compared to every other mascara brush I've used. It definitely doesn't feel anything like a comb and I certainly didn't think my lashes looked particularly separated.

APPLICATION

It's pretty easy to use and I like the thinner brush which doesn't deposit great chunks of mascara onto my upper eyelids. I don't know whether I have particularly mascara-friendly eyelids or whether it's my technique, but it always seems to happen and I hate it! I like to get the brush to the base of my lashes and wiggle it through to the end; the fact that the brush is reasonably thin means I can do this without risking getting mascara everywhere. The product itself doesn't smell of anything except that usual mascara smell, and it's a nice deep black, but perhaps not as sooty and true-black as I'd ideally like. Compared to the colour of, say, Benefit Bad Gal Lash, it's actually kind of weedy...

I'm not sure about the claims of weightlessness, either. It's very easy to get too much of this on just with one application, which has left my eyes looking a bit, well, spidery at times. Far from acting like a comb and a brush, I've thought more than once that I could really do with an eyelash comb to separate some of the blobs and give my lashes a little less gunkiness, so be aware that dipping the brush into the tube more than once may result in real old-lady spidery lashes!

PERFORMANCE

Sumptuous Lifting Bold Volume Mascara more than fulfils my requirements of giving my lashes colour and defining them more than they already are, but frankly, anything with pigment in would do that as my lashes are naturally so blonde. I suspect that if your lashes are naturally dark then this might not do all that much for you - I don't reckon my lashes looked wider, thicker or that much more volumised; if anything, the blobbiness and tendency to deposit a little too much mascara with each brushstroke meant they felt a bit weighed down and spidery.

STAYING POWER

This mascara lasts well all day and into the evening. It does flake a little, not much, but it's worth mentioning that I did notice a couple of bits under my eyes at the end of the day. I used the non-waterproof one as I absolutely hate waterproof mascaras, but it still took a fair bit of scrubbing with hot water and some remover to get all traces of it off. When it wipes off onto a cotton pad you can see that there actually are "lash-thickening fibres" - it comes off weirdly in strands.

PRICE AND AVAILABILITY

Sumptuous Lifting Bold Volume Mascara is £19 and can be bought at Boots and other places which have an Estee Lauder counter. It's definitely a higher-end purchase so it might be worth first getting hold of some samples on Ebay or something if you can - I won't be repurchasing and it seems a shame to waste money on something so expensive without doing a test.

OVERALL

I'm not overly impressed with this one, to be honest. It wasn't a bad offering and it didn't irritate my eyes or all slide off at the end of the day; it was just a bit underwhelming and too spidery for my liking. I shouldn't need to want to comb my lashes through with something else to get the excess off - I think I'll give it a miss next time.