Once upon a time, long, long ago, I cut all my hair off. Yes, all of it. Okay, most of it. What remained was a one-inch pixie modeled after her majesty Victoria Beckham’s, right after she debuted hers. It was beautiful and easy but once I decided to grow it back in, I had no idea how to style it. So one day, I got it permed. This is not a horror story. The curls didn’t look great but they didn’t look terrible. The one takeaway I’ve carried with me ever since was that my hair was curly as all hell. Which is why when I saw that my neighbourhood lash boutique had added ‘lash perm’ to their menu, I signed right up.
I waited two weeks before going in to Lust For Lashes for my lash perm. In those two weeks, neither a curler nor a wand of mascara touched my eyelashes. It was tough but I wanted them as fresh and pure as possible without any breakage – something my lash guru had noticed the last time I went in.
The process is not unlike getting eyelash extensions: you’re lying down comfortably, your eyes are closed and a woman with particularly skilled hands is touching your eyes.
The procedure (a bit of an extreme word but I’m going with it) takes around an hour. Lashes are cleaned and combed before a cool gel pad is placed on lower lashes to keep them out of the way. A small dome-shaped piece of rubber is placed on your upper lid right at the eyelash line. Depending on how curly you want your lashes, the roundness of the dome changes shape. I asked for the curliest curl since Shirley Temple.
Once all the eye apparatuses are firmly in place, the perming solutions are painted over the lashes, a fresh coat every 12 – 15 minutes. And holy moley does it ever smell like perm solution. So much so that I was transported back to my shoulder-length hair wrapped tight around those rollers.
I’m not going to lie to you (I haven’t yet) there were a few moments where I found that the solution was making my upper water line tingle and burn. But for curly lashes, I would have eaten it.
At the end of the session, everything was removed and my lashes were gloriously curly! I mean, noticeably so. As a faithful eyelash extension practitioner, I was worried my naked lashes would never live up to the hype but good God was I ever impressed. And I am every day when my eyelashes look lush and voluminous with or without mascara and nary a curler in sight. My name is Bianca and I haven’t curled my eyelashes in three weeks!
