I am currently having a severe case of lash envy. It all started when I met a girl with lashes that curled right up to her eyebrows. Okay, that sounds a bit bizarre. But it didn’t look it at all. She looked liked she’d stepped out of a mascara ad, but without the obvious falsies. (You know that most mascara ads mix false and real lashes, right? So it surprises me that a makeup company in the UK was recently charged with misleading advertising, after some consumers complained about the unrealistic lashes in their ad. I just thought everyone knew what went down on a lash shoot. Same with shampoo ads. That shine is just not normal. And show me any makeup or skincare ad that isn’t retouched. Anyhoo).
My lash obsession then kicked into overdrive at a Lancôme briefing I attended, where we were presented with research that showed that women’s lashes (and they’d photographed 4800 pairs of them) could be divided into six categories: beautiful, weakened, fair, straight, irregularly shaped, and unruly. I think mine tick both the unruly and the fair boxes. Definitely not the beautiful one, which is the kind of lash so luscious and long that it doesn’t actually need mascara at all.
The lash envy continued at the David Jones summer fashion collections last night, where I saw a few gorgeous frocks, but mostly couldn’t take my eyes off the models’ lashes – all flicky and flirty and the exact opposite of my fair, unruly kind.
I don’t have a happy ending to this story yet. All I can is that if you’re born with un-beautiful lashes, you just have to work a bit harder to not look so lash-challenged. A lash curler and a great mascara are musts – Lancôme can always be relied on for a magic wand. So too are a few clusters of falsies. Not the strip, which makes you look like some heavy insect has landed on your lid. But some individual lashes stuck at the very outer lashline, to give your eyes a bit of a kick. Try: Model Co Lash Out Individual Lashes + Glue ($18 from Model Co Shop).
