Update: A year after first encouraging animal lovers everywhere to send in their old mascara wands to help care for thousands of injured and orphaned wild animals, Appalachian Wildlife Refuge has gained a major ally in support of their Wands for Wildlife initiative. To celebrate the launch of its new Lash Renegade Mascara in Avenging Amethyst, which is available as of today, Wet n Wild has pledged to donate $1 from each Lash Renegade Mascara mascara sold to the organization, up to $10,000.
So once you start scraping the sides of your current tube, ship the old wand out to Wands for Wildlife, then pick up a fresh Lash Renegade to benefit the wild babies of western North Carolina. For now, just make sure whatever's on your lashes is waterproof — the video below, demonstrating how the old wands are used, is all but guaranteed to bring a tear to your eye.
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Courtesy of Wands for Wildlife.
This story was originally published on March 14, 2017.
The next time you polish off a tube of mascara (or, as is more likely, it dries up after you’ve stretched out its use long past the three-month expiration date), don’t be so quick to chuck the empty packaging into the recycling bin. (You are recycling that, right?)
Appalachian Wildlife Refuge, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that helps to rehabilitate injured and orphaned wildlife in Western North Carolina, has a much better idea for what to do with those discarded mascara wands — and no, it does not involve using them to groom your brows. Inspired by her own cleaned-out makeup drawer, the foundation’s co-founder, Savanna Trantham, shared to Facebook that the refuge uses them to help clean the fur of animals (on the smaller side, we assume) they’ve rescued.
The post quickly garnered tens of thousands of shares, which we can only assume means that Trantham has more clean mascara wands than she can count coming her way. But given that the refuge’s new triage facility is likely to see over 2,000 injured and orphaned wild animals in its first year of operation alone, they do still need our help.
If you’ve been waiting for a sign that it's time to finally dig through your makeup bag and toss those sad-looking tubes, now’s the perfect time — and if you want to take your goodwill to the next level, Appalachian Wildlife Refuge also has an extensive wishlist of items they need to keep their furry (and scaly) patients on the up and up. Seriously, how could you resist those baby chipmunks?