It is difficult to wear false eyelashes made of red fox fur and have almost everyone fail to notice. Jennifer Lopez achieved this feat at the 2001 Academy Awards by combining her ostentatious eyelash couture with a dress that was see-through on top.
Enough people did notice the lashes, however, or at least read the press releases, so that a trend was sparked. Madonna fanned the fires by appearing in photos advertising her 2004 Re-Invention tour wearing mink eyelashes.
False eyelashes -- last popular in the 1960s when tastemakers like Twiggy and Mary Quant made panda eyes (and elfin haircuts) a trademark of Carnaby Street -- are returning to America's makeup bags. Sales of false lashes in drugstores were up 16 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the market research group AC Nielsen.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
The craze has produced two "eyelash bars," where for about US$22 a customer can buy a set of lashes (and adhesive) and have them applied. Both are in Shu Uemura boutiques, one in the SoHo branch in Manhattan and one that opened last month in the Fillmore district of San Francisco.
One day last week at the San Francisco bar a young woman who planned to wear faux lashes at her wedding was getting a lesson in how to apply them from Michael Baumann, a makeup artist. Afterward, her eyes looked beautiful and surprisingly natural. She wore Flare Eyelashes: individual clusters of two or three lashes applied here and there, most prominently at the outside edges of the eyes. Flares do for the eyes what the push-up bra does for decolletage. The effect is dramatic but subtle.
I had come for a full set of false lashes, the mink, Madonna-issue kind. (Note of clarification: "Mink eyelashes" are made of individually selected mink hairs that have been harvested by gently brushing live animals. Mink eyelashes are not cruel, just slightly absurd.)
Baumann deftly demonstrated the proper application of the adhesive, placing a drop on the back of his hand and then dipping the tip of a brush handle into the glue. He ran the glue along the seam of the false lashes. You mustn't squeeze the glue onto your eyelid, he said, or you will "have too much glue, and then your eyes are going to stick together."
The National Injury Information Clearinghouse of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission does not track injuries caused by false eyelashes, so it is impossible to know how often this happens. At least one primate, however, has suffered. (See the February 1968 issue of Clinical Pediatrics, Page 107: Gastro-intestinal obstruction by eyelash adhesive in a Wooley monkey.)
It took only 30 seconds for Baumann to position and set the right eyelash. It was lighter than I had expected, but felt clammy and odd. "It's still a little wet, a little tacky," he said, adding that once the glue dried, I would not feel it. But would I still see it? A black spidery thing hovered at the top of my field of vision. Baumann assured me this would go away, and soon it did. A glance in the mirror revealed that I looked, to use Baumann's phrasing, "a little tacky." I headed off to meet two friends for a drink.
"If I'd just met you," my friend Steph said, "I would make a negative character judgment." But in dim light, or from a modest distance, I found the lashes sexy and glam, the sort of look that would work at a nightclub or onstage.
I should add that when I was at the eyelash bar, the entire staff was wearing faux lashes -- albeit subtler ones -- in broad daylight, and none of them looked tacky or overly made-up. They looked gorgeous. Still, if I could buy any one thing in the Shu Uemura boutique, I'd choose their miraculously unclumpy mascara, which requires neither glue nor a stage career to work well.
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