In Perl, the slashes are not part of the regular expression. So drop them and you're getting close to something you could use.

@compare = ('^foo ', ' bar$');
$i=0;
foreach (@compare){
   unless $test =~ $compare[$i]){
      print $test;
      $i++
   }
}
[download]

But even though this will work, I agree with kvale: if at all possible, you'd be better of using qr//.