We Try Before You Buy: Victoria's Secret Miraculous Bra, Tide to Go Pen

April 18, 2011 — -- Commercials have only seconds to convince us, so their claims are often dramatic. So we set out to determine whether some popular products deliver on their big promises.

Miraculous Bra

To get a baseline bra size, I had Christina Ignacio, a bra fit expert at Bounce.com measure me in a standard bra. I am a 36A.

The next step was to purchase the bra. It cost almost $50 and when I first looked at it, I was amazed by the amount of cushioning and the strategic placement of the padding.

It was seriously stacked on the outside of the cups so it wedged me in tight toward the middle of my chest.

It also had the traditional push-up feel towards the bottom of the cup so I felt like my girls were up on a shelf.

The Miraculous Bra gave me a massive boost that created a significant amount of cleavage. With the Victoria's Secret Miraculous Bra on, I bumped up to a 36C. The Miraculous Bra lived up to its claims of adding two cup sizes in lift.

Tide to Go Pen

I tried the Tide at an Italian restaurant and the pen did a super job on every stain: wine, pasta sauce, even greasy meatballs.

While it didn't erase stains completely (you could tell the shirt was wet and slightly off color where it had been stained), the Tide to Go pen removed enough of the stain that I could get through dinner without having a huge blotch on my white shirt.

More importantly, when I washed the stained items at home, they all came out perfectly clean.

Tide said, "The Tide To-Go mini helps remove many fresh food and drink stains and is safe to use on most colorfast, machine washable and dry cleanable fabrics."

Mister Steamy

It is filled with a foam center that you wet with water to release steam as it bounces around your drying laundry. Their ad says it's the fastest way to get wrinkles out without an iron.

I hate ironing so I really wanted this to work. I had a standard load of laundry including three white cotton button-down shirts that usually need ironing after washing.

I followed the directions and put Mister Steamy into the dryer (one note- it really bumps around inside the dryer and it's loud).

When I took the dried Mister Steamy load out of the wash, the white cotton dress shirts were very wrinkled including one that had a crumpled collar with the buttons folded in on themselves. They still needed ironing.

For comparison, I washed a similar load including white cotton button downs and then dried them with only a dryer sheet.

The cotton shirts came out in the exact same condition as those dried with Mister Steamy and in a side-by-side comparison I couldn't tell any difference between the Mister Steamy load and the standard load in terms of wrinkles.

We contacted the company who sells Mister Steamy and they said "We have sold millions of Mister Steamy dryer balls and consumers are quite satisfied. When used as directed, Mister Steamy delivers great results."

Stops the Sting

The only problem with testing the product? It means I have to get stung ... twice. Still want to trade places?

The first thing I had to do was make the bees angry, as they were perfectly content to fly around me and go about their pollen-collecting day.

In general, honey bees aren't aggressive unless you try to go after their honey or their queen.

They weren't really responding to the usual "Your queen is so fat..." jokes, so I had to stick my hands inside their man-made hives and knock around a bit before one would sting me. But I couldn't get stung just once, I had to get one sting on each hand.

So with both hands properly stung, it was time to put the ointment on one hand, and leave the other alone. After about 30 seconds, both hands still hurt. Maybe it just needed time to work.

After about five minutes, I started to notice a difference.

The hand that had no ointment was starting to swell, and the pain was still throbbing.

The hand with the Stops the Sting ointment was hurting less and wasn't swelling. And after 30 minutes, the hand with no ointment was still swelled and throbbing with pain, the hand with the Stops the Sting ointment?

No swelling and I could even hit it with my other hand without it hurting.

Conclusion: this stuff works and while some product promises are a real pain, this one lives up to the buzz.