After 15 years and thousands of dollars, interior designer Jill Higginson decided to divorce one of the longest relationships in her life: the one with her eyelash extensions. What started as a beauty ritual that made her feel confident and glamorous had morphed into a vibe that didn’t feel—or look—especially modern to her anymore.
“I’d come home from an appointment and my daughter would ask me, ‘Why do your lashes look like that?’” Higginson says, “I didn’t have an answer for her.” Then the 41-year-old would spend time after her appointment picking some of the freshly glued on lashes out to make them look more natural.
So she decided enough was enough. To make it official she uploaded a short video to TikTok documenting the state of her lashes before the removal and after. The comments on the video, with 12.8 million views and counting, cheered her on.
One read, “Literally everyone looks better without lash extensions. I’m so happy we all jumped on this movement.” Others remarked on how much younger she looked post transformation. It was official: She won the breakup.
TikTok content
Higginson is just one of a handful of women abandoning their eyelash extensions who we spoke to among hundreds gaining traction on TikTok. Judging by social media and the beauty industry’s recent shift toward a more natural aesthetic, the once wildly popular service has been deemed too try-hard (or, in internet parlance, cheugy).
But there are tangible reasons behind the service’s downfall in addition to not being considered cool by people on the internet. For starters, getting lash extensions is time-consuming: The average appointment for a full set ranges from two to three hours, and biweekly fills take at least 45 minutes.
Elizabeth Maclay, a stay-at-home mom and content creator from Boston, somehow managed to make her weekly lash appointments for six years despite juggling two kids and her preferred studio being over 30 minutes away. “I would not miss a lash appointment for anything,” she says. “But between the driving and the actual appointment time, I couldn’t take it anymore.”
The service is also overwhelmingly expensive, costing anywhere from $200 to $500 for a full set and a minimum of $75 for fills. On top of that, longterm wear can damage your natural lashes. “The glue that lash technicians are using is literally nail glue,” says Beau Nelson, celebrity makeup artist and director of Lashify Pro. “That superglue-type material hardens and becomes brittle. Your lashes will break right off if you’re not really careful.”
Lashify, an at-home lash-extension system, was actually started because the founder, Sahara Lotti, was sick of spending so much time and money in a lash studio. The result is a hybrid of strip-lash application and traditional professional extensions.
But when it comes down to it, most of the women we spoke with agreed that eyelash extensions just didn’t look good to them anymore. In the months leading up to their removal, Maclay’s lashes started to lose their luster. “I started to hate the look of them,” she said. “No matter how talented your tech is, they just look tacky to me. They tend to look better when you’re in full glam, but when you wake up, it’s pretty severe.”
Now she prefers cluster lashes from Flutterhabit, a DIY lash company that markets its product as the at-home alternative to salon lashes. One pair is supposed to last up to 10 days. “I usually pop them on before a date night or when have something special going on. I love the way they look, and I love that I can take them off,” Maclay says.
Options from Flutterhabit or Lashify are appealing because they don’t feel so permanent and don’t require as much of an expenditure upfront.
Celeste Rojas, the 24-year-old owner of Tipcee Mobile, a bartending service based in Reno, echoes Maclay’s sentiments. She started getting extensions seven years ago after one of her coworkers raved about the service. After her first visit, she fell in love with waking up to fresh fluttering lashes without the burden of mascara or DIY falsies.
“I was a cheerleader in college,” she said, “So I loved the idea of looking ready all the time.” But now, she doesn’t think lash extensions look or feel current. “People are gravitating toward that ‘clean girl’ look instead."
Alexandra Rabadi, owner of a med-spa tools company, says she gave up on lashes because she started to feel increasingly overwhelmed with the number of services she had to keep up with in order to achieve what she perceived as her best self. She wanted a fresh start.
“There’s only so much Botox and filler and lash extensions and makeup you can put on in order to wake up in the morning and feel really good about yourself,” she says.
After quitting extensions cold turkey, Rabadi, 26, says her face looked unfamiliar to her, but over time she fell in love with her natural lashes.
“Having them removed made me look younger,” she says. It also inspired her to play with new types of makeup and experiment with her beauty routine. These days she embraces a more barefaced look. “I definitely feel more like myself.”
Consumers aren’t the only ones feeling the change. Lash technicians have taken notice.
Taylor Mendoza, a licensed esthetician and lash technician based in Clermont, Florida, has noticed the change and has mixed feelings. “I work with a lot of mature clients who aren’t on social media, and their requests haven’t changed,” she said. “But my younger clients definitely are requesting more natural-looking sets. Everybody is in their clean-girl or soft-girl era.”
As a precaution, Mendoza has added more services like eyebrow lamination and waxing to her arsenal just in case.
Clementina Richardson, a lash technician and founder of Envious Lashes in New York City, has had a different experience. “It depends on your clientele. It makes sense people are cutting back on lashes due to economic situations; however, I have clients that have been coming to me for 15 years, and they continue to come every two weeks,” she says.
Despite what she may see on social media, Mendoza credits the shift to trends and is confident the tide will eventually turn back.
But for women like Rojas, being able to rub her eyes has been “borderline orgasmic.”
Anneke Knot is a freelance beauty and fashion writer based in San Francisco. She is the former assistant beauty editor for Real Simple and Health Magazine. Follow her @annekeknot.
