The strange history of false lashes

Featuring Victorian eyelid sewing, a Canadian inventor, and one very extra film director.

the lore · 4 minute read

Before falsies: kohl and worse

Dramatic lashes are ancient. Egyptians of every gender darkened their lashes and lids with kohl thousands of years ago - partly beauty, partly sun protection, partly warding off the evil eye. The urge to enhance the lash line is about as old as the mirror.

1882: the part you will tell people about

In the late 1800s, Parisian fashion writing described a genuinely upsetting procedure: hair sewn through the edge of the eyelid with a fine needle to create permanent lashes. Newspapers of the era reported it as an actual practice among the fashionable. Whether it was widespread or mostly lurid copy, the takeaway is the same - people wanted big lashes badly enough that sewing hair into the eyelid made the papers as a beauty tip. You will never complain about lash glue again.

1902-1911: the patents

Civilization improved on the needle. German-born hairdresser Charles Nessler (later famous for the permanent wave) patented artificial eyelash methods in the UK in 1902 and sold lash services from his London salon. Then in 1911, Canadian inventor Anna Taylor received a US patent for the thing you would recognize today: a crescent-shaped strip with short hairs attached - the strip lash, invented.

1916: Hollywood goes full send

The modern falsie's big break came on a film set. Director D.W. Griffith, shooting the epic Intolerance, decided actress Seena Owen's eyes needed lashes that brushed her cheeks. A wigmaker built them from human hair and gauze, glued them on, and the close-up did the rest. Actresses wanted them, studios supplied them, and by the flapper era falsies were a product, not a prop.

1960s to now: Twiggy to the $26 billion eye

The sixties made lashes the whole look - Twiggy's painted-on lower lashes and stacked falsies turned eyes into graphic design. Semi-permanent extensions arrived from Asia in the early 2000s and turned lashes into an appointment. Today the global false lash industry is measured in the tens of billions of dollars, with most of the world's lashes manufactured in Qingdao, China - a single city quietly fringing the planet's eyelids.

The unsolved problem in all that history: nobody ever rated the hardware. Lashes got longer, glasses stayed 12 to 14 mm from the eye, and a century of falsies smacked a century of lenses. That is the part we fixed.

See the fix: the Wingspan rating system, or check your own set in the clearance checker.