Blood, Sweat, and Lashes: Inside the Competitive and Cutthroat False-Eyelash Market

First there was kohl. That was ancient Egypt, where both men and women used malachite and kohl to darken their lashes, but it took until the 19th century to bottle mascara and start the false-lash trend. Back then, the French began sewing hairs onto their eyelids, and a Canadian in the US patented an early version of “strip lashes,” the familiar crescent of lashes we now buy in pharmacies. Since then, oversized lashes have been intermittently popular—think Twiggy in the 1960s—with the current explosion beginning in the early 2000s, when the Asian eyelash-extension craze began to rip through Hollywood, with celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Paris Hilton cramming into estheticians’ chairs to achieve peak flutter.

During these years, I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a friend who was obsessed with lashes. Sahara Lotti was a screenwriter who was also furiously buying and selling Balenciaga bags. She’d noticed that most of what she saw for sale online was fake, and wrote a manifesto about how to spot it, then sold a PDF of instructions online for five dollars. After that, she started calling around to Barneys and other department stores to order real Balenciagas, flipping them for a higher price on eBay. This sideline faded when she landed a script deal with Fox, but then she started moonlighting as an online intuitive, gathering Hollywood clients before she went on retainer for a member of the royal family of Qatar.

In other words, Lotti was a woman who could spot a hole in the market. And as she became increasingly intolerant of going out without her lashes, and increasingly bored of sitting in Koreatown having them applied on end, she started messing with lashes herself, trying to suss out a DIY method. My husband introduced her to an industrial designer for Starbucks who was interested in picking up freelance work, and the industrial designer introduced her to a brand designer. Within a few months, they all flew off to Korea. After that, when I’d visit her at home on Sunset Plaza Drive, she’d be focused on hair irons, glues, and cut-up lashes. She created a tweezer shaped like a Nike swoosh she called a “wand”; she wanted to attach each little cluster of hairs to the eye individually, which made fake lashes look more natural.  

Lotti set Lashify’s price point high, and the margin higher. She rented a loft office on Greene Street, a warehouse in North Hollywood, a pop-up store in SoHo. Lupita Nyong’o and Nicole Kidman were wearing Lashify, and so was Cynthia Nixon during her campaign for mayor. Not that there was anything glamorous about the eyelash business; it was a grind, and she worked around the clock, convinced she was going to win this lash game. Like all entrepreneurs, particularly one who thinks she can read the future, she believed it was only a matter of time before everyone on earth realized they didn’t need mascara or extensions. They just needed Lashify. 

There were other female inventors in the space, but not many. In 2012, Alexandra Byrne of Beta Beauty Lab patented a segmented style of strip lashes. Byrne wrote via email, “My technology came from being a makeup artist for runway shows in London, Europe, and New York. When I wanted the models to all look exactly the same, like an army, I started cutting apart different strip lashes into pieces (I called it the lash hospital) and then fitting every model individually—it was the only way to make all lashes look identical, by customizing them for each eye shape and face.” 

There was also Katy Stoka, inventor of the wildly popular magnetic lash. Stoka’s lashes used rectangular magnets to attach fake lashes to your real ones. “It was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears developing the product, and then it was the biggest thrill of my life,” says Stoka. “I wasn’t even in the beauty industry and I invented something, built a patent around it, somehow got the prototype made. Next thing I knew, I was on the shelf in Sephora, and then we were the number-one-googled beauty question of 2018.” 

Stoka was knocked off by Asian suppliers, who flooded the market with dupes—not a surprise in the IP game. You probably know that music is heavily copyrighted in the United States, and that fashion is largely not (the evidence is on display every time you walk into an H&M), but beauty giants take out loads of patents. For example, as of July 2020, L’Oréal has 3,717 patent families to guard against the types of lawsuits and conflicts that abound these days. Charlotte Tilbury pursued and won a copyright claim in the UK against Aldi after it released a makeup palette that she claimed copied her Filmstar Bronze and Glow. (At the time, an Aldi spokesperson said, “This matter relates to a product that was on sale for a very short period around December 2018.”) Revolution Beauty pulled its Honey Bear brow product off the market after indie brand Pink Honey accused it on social media of copying its Honey Glue Original Superhold for brows. Olaplex initially won a suit against L’Oréal, claiming the brand copied its hair-treatment tech, but an appeals court later threw out the ruling. (The case has since been settled to “mutual satisfaction,” the CEO of Olaplex told The New York Times.)