Curling Your Curl Hating Lashes

My lashes are pale, straight and point determinedly downwards. After years of curling them only to have the curl fall out almost immediately, I’ve searched more blog posts and youtube videos than I could count trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. This list of curling tips is basically a collection of the tips I learnt from my search. I think the key here is experimentation, everyone has very different eyelashes and very different ideas of how they want them to look so you have to play about with it a bit and find out what works for you.

The right mascara

In the UK at least, mascara is ridiculously expensive. Worse than that, you can’t test it and its hard to tell from reviews whether or not you would like it. For these reasons I hate buying mascara and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money looking for something that would hold the curl. I ended up with Maybelline Great Lash in the waterproof formula, its cheap, well reviewed and waterproof which is what everyone said would hold a curl. This works well for me (apart from being almost impossible to remove) and it definitely holds the curl where non-waterproof mascaras did not. However, for many people using a non-waterproof mascara holds the curl fine and you're also less likely to find a horrible and sticky or irremovable formula in a non-waterproof mascara.

The right method

The two methods I most commonly hear of are simply holding your lash curler down for a few seconds, or the working your way up the lash method, holding the curler down and then releasing it and moving it slightly further up the lash before repeating. For my particularly stubborn lashes, neither does any good. I have to get the curler as close to the root as I can get it (bear in mind this is not very close to the root at all) and hold it in place for a good deal of time, I’d say about 15 seconds. I have to curl it until it looks ridiculous and my lashes are pointing straight up and touching my eyebrows because it will then fall back into a good curl.

The right eyelash curler

This is the step I don’t know much about, my cheap eyelash curler (I can't even remember where it's from) has served me well enough and I don’t see how the curler you use could have much impact on how long the curl lasts. However, mine is a bit annoying to use and I’ve been wondering whether to invest in the shu uemura eyelash curler which seems to be the most highly recommended. Thoughts?