Towards the end of the 19th century, women in Paris began sewing hairs on to their eyelids. The Dundee Courier detailed the procedure, which began with rubbing the lower lid with cocaine before running a fine needle threaded with hair from the head, “through the extreme edges of the eyelid… leaving its hair thread in loops of carefully graduated length”. Long lashes had been fashionable by then for some time, a symbol of youth and innocence, and by the early 20th century a thriving industry in false lashes had emerged. “When a fair young thing looks at you mistily through her long, curling lashes, do not fall for it until you investigate,” warned one columnist in 1921. “The long, curling eyelashes may not be hers, except by right of purchase.” Last year the global eyelash extension market was valued at $1.66bn, expected to double by 2032, and industry trade body Beauty Guild estimates that 129,000 lash treatments are carried out every week in the UK, making them the most popular salon service in the country.
I’m thinking about the Parisian cocaine girls bleeding from their eyelids as I approach the west London studio of Camilla Kirk Reynolds. She is on the shortlist of recommended lash technicians I’ve compiled from beauty editors and lash devotees, asking whose lashes last longest, who can offer both a naturalistic lift and a Bambi-like visor, who can make me look, please, alive. I ring on the bell and am shown through a quaint bookshop, downstairs to where she shares treatment rooms with psychoanalysts. The bookshop, Camilla explains lightly, is a front, their shared visitors preferring not to be seen seeking therapy, beauty or otherwise.
