false lashes | little lotus blossom beauty

I attended a wedding in LA last month and decided to do my errands a few days before my departure and to test run my makeup at the same time. For me, that means BB cream (which I use as foundation), eye lid primer, eyebrow powder, eyeshadow, blush, lipstick, gloss, and… false lashes. Before then, I’d never successfully applied them let alone worn them out in public.

My lashes are hard to work with. For one thing, my eyelids hood over and push the lashes down, making my lashes look super stubby. And because the lids hood over, they also make proper fake lash placement really tricky. Sigh.

Another issue I have with falsies is that on me, they LOOK fake. Every set of fakies I’ve purchased just don’t look right on me. Maybe it’s because I’m not used to seeing long thick lashes on myself?

But on this day, I was determined to try again. I found lashes by Eylure Naturalites that didn’t look intimidating and had a thin strip, which for me meant I wouldn’t have to pile on the eyeliner. They looked like they would be a subtle enhancement to my eyes which was exactly the effect I wanted. I also felt like the #2os were a good way to ease into fake lashes before graduating to the va-va-voom ones later.

I primed my lids with EyesLipsFace’s eye lid primer, applied the copper cream gel liner from Physician’s Formula, and curled my lashes, applied mascara, curled again, and picked up the Eylure Naturalites #020 lashes, which came with a wee tube of glue, the kind that has a tiny plastic applicator tip so you can just draw the glue along the strip. Did I mention the strip base is really thin? The benefit to this is it’s lighter than typical fake lashes and is a little more comfortable to wear. The downside: getting the glue onto the base was a bit of a challenge for me. I wish I’d thought to use a toothpick instead of the applicator because I got glue on the lashes. My hands are just not very steady. Good thing I’m not a brain surgeon.

Common advice is to let the glue dry a bit before sticking the lashes onto your eyes, which makes sense if you’re a seasoned falsie user. Because I’m a rube, I wanted the extra few seconds to be able to position the lash strip just where I wanted it in case I stuck it on crookedly. So I applied the glue, waited a second as my nod to conventional wisdom, and put that sucker on my eyelid. I’m glad I didn’t wait for the glue to dry first because just as I’d expected, I had to re-position the lash strip a couple of times. Once I got them on, I went back over the base with more eye liner (and getting a little on the lashes while I was at it :(), curled the lashes so they’d all blend together, and stepped back to look at the results.

Wow, what a difference these lashes made! My eyes are normally very small and using even these subtle fake lashes made them look larger and more awake. I wasn’t able to wear my glasses with the lashes on (because the lashes kept brushing up against the lenses) but who the heck cares when you look that nice?!

Later in the day, maybe about six or so hours after I’d applied the lashes, I noticed they were coming off! The glue that came with them doesn’t last very long, yet wouldn’t come off my eyelids! Really disappointing.

The day of the wedding, I recreated the look (using lash glue by Duo this time) and asked my BFF if he thought my lashes looked funny. Until that moment, he hadn’t even realized I was wearing false lashes and approvingly commented that they looked like they were my own.

I’m really impressed with these Eylure Naturalite Natural Volume lashes. Lightweight, subtle but yet present, I plan to buy a few more sets of the #20s but I won’t be using the glue that comes with it. Maybe I’ll even get brave enough to try the thicker-volume ones!