Within the age of COVID-19, face masks have made eyes — and brows — the main focus.

“Without delay, the eyes are the thing that’s charming everybody’s look,” said Yasmin Maya, generally known as BeautyyBird to her greater than 1 million YouTube subscribers. “Everyone desires to have their eyes looking beautiful or having them stand out.”

When the sweetness vlogger decided to begin her own brand, launching with false lashes was a no brainer, she said.

“Lashes is what does it for everyone right away,” she continued. “Even should you were to go on a date, I mean, you continue to need to wear your mask, so how will you be flirty and be seductive and all that? It’s just type of having the eyes speak for themselves.”

She launched Birdy Lashes in December with two faux-mink lash styles and two eyeliners that double as adhesives. The liner-glue combo makes each day false lash wear easier, she said, and her aim is to offer quality and lightweight vegan options at an inexpensive cost. Every little thing is priced at $12, and lashes may be reused as much as 25 times.

Innovation within the category has been centered on enhancing the applying means of false lashes. Jenna Lyons, for instance, the designer turned lash entrepreneur who launched Loveseen last yr, has introduced a $34 bespoke tool that appears like tweezers crossed with the curvature of a mascara wand, to make application easier for consumers.

Meanwhile, Ann McFerran, founder and chief executive officer of Glamnetic, has turn out to be a significant player together with her magnetic eyelashes and eyeliners, which permit for false lashes to be applied in seconds (with each vegan and mink products, starting at $29.99 for a pair). Launched in August 2019, Glamnetic’s revenue doubled month-over-month and reached $50 million in total sales last yr. It’s projected to grow right into a nine-figure business in 2021, said McFerran, who has grown her team to 70. Together with being direct-to-consumer, Glamnetic is found at Ulta and Amazon and plans to expand into other retailers this yr.

Before launching her brand, “magnetic lashes had gone viral for a moment after which went crashing down,” said McFerran, adding that the execution was poor, and in consequence, the trend fizzled away. She saw a niche available in the market, as someone who frequently used false lashes herself, and developed a magnet mechanism that worked well and offered quite a lot of lash styles including a “full glam look.”

Eyelash trends, as with all beauty norms, vary across cultures and have modified from decade to decade. The business of lengthening and thickening eyelashes dates back to not less than the nineteenth century in France, where a procedure involving sewing human hairs onto eyelids developed in Paris. By 1911, a Canadian woman named Anna Taylor reportedly received a U.S. patent for false eyelashes, placing pieces of cloth with hairs onto lash lines with an adhesive — a way that’s much like the lash strips used today.

As of late, it’s not nearly products but treatments, too. Salons offer eyelash perms, where a relaxer is used to control and curl natural eyelashes, in addition to eyelash extensions, where either mink fur (the hair is brushed off the animal) or faux hairs — typically manufactured from a plastic fiber called polybutylene terephthalate — are manually glued onto existing eyelashes by licensed cosmetologists. Costs vary tremendously depending on the salon but start around $150 for a basic full set.

“There are 34,000 lash services within the U.S., growing about 30 percent a yr,” said Philippe Sanchez, CEO of Luum. “And yet it’s still very fragmented. It’s not a really sophisticated service today.”

Luum, founded by Nathan Harding and Kurt Amundson in Oakland, Calif., is trying to innovate the category within the service industry. The corporate, which is three years within the making, has developed technology and machinery using computer vision, artificial intelligence and robotics to reinvent the business of eyelashes.

The service is “exactly like a manual extension,” Sanchez said. Customers close their eyes because the machine applies the lash extensions, while a licensed technician is present.

The profit, he said, is a much faster service, cutting down what generally is a two-and half-hour endeavor to twenty minutes. The robotic element is quick and precise, he said, while the pc vision is capable of work on a microscopic level, and AI is used to adapt to the various sorts of human faces and eyelashes.

“The best way the technology works, it’s extremely protected since the lash may be very, very light, due to this fact we don’t need force to control the lash,” Sanchez said. The arm-like a part of the machine that applies each lash is light in weight. “It’s a tool, a technology that transforms the experience for consumers and empowers the expert lash artist to do what she or he is best at, to present stylistic guidance, advice, prep and finish off.”

The corporate, which raised $10 million and is trying to collect its next round of funding, will open its first salon within the Bay Area in the approaching months, offering a premium service “at a competitive price.” Los Angeles — the number-one market in lash extensions, in line with Sanchez — is next, followed by locations in Asia.

It was in Asia, predominantly in Japan throughout the Aughts, that eyelash extensions first boomed. Within the U.S., Hollywood has influenced eyelash trends for the reason that days of silent film starlets. Then got here Fifties glamour with icons like Marilyn Monroe, followed by the Nineteen Sixties with more playful looks worn by fashion figures like Twiggy. There was Cher within the ’70s, Madonna within the ’80s, and the supermodels within the Nineties, who repopularized daring, voluminous lashes. But culturally, it was when modern celebrities equivalent to Paris Hilton and Jennifer Lopez were seen wearing false lashes frequently that the general public took notice, and the industry grew within the mass market (Lopez famously wore a pair manufactured from red fox fur by Shu Uemura to the 2001 Oscars).

The worldwide false eyelashes market size was valued at $1.1 billion in 2018, in line with market research firm Grand View Research and is anticipated to succeed in $1.6 billion by 2025. The complete eye market, which incorporates each eyelashes and brows, was estimated at $14.52 billion in 2018, the corporate reports. Within the U.S., though eye makeup sales dipped in 2020 as a result of the pandemic, the category was essentially the most profitable segment in cosmetics last yr, with a sales revenue of $1.96 billion, in line with market and consumer data firm Statista.

On the retail side, Sephora saw success last yr in each brow and lash categories, as clients “prioritized above the mask beauty,” said Alison Hahn, senior vp of merchandising in makeup, in an announcement.

“Specifically, we saw increased demand for brow and lash enhancements,” she said. “Prior to mask-wearing shifting client’s beauty habits, we saw a latest trend developing toward a more natural, fluffy brow look that helped drive heightened interest within the category….We anticipate continued growth for brow and lash products as clients remain home without regular access to salons. Clients will proceed to prioritize above the mask beauty — like specializing in the eyes and tending to brows and lashes.”

Eyebrow trends, too, have shifted throughout the years, yo-yoing between the influence of full brows with popular culture figures like Brooke Shields and Cara Delevingne or pencil thin variations, most notably seen on Pamela Anderson and Gwen Stefani — who now has fuller brows.

“The best eyebrow makeover of all time is Gwen Stefani, because she had this uber thin brow within the 2000s when she was going through her rock stage, her solo artist debut,” said Natalie Plain, founding father of Billion Dollar Brows. “Should you have a look at her now, she’s completely transformed her brow.”

Plain launched her brand in 2004 with Brow Boost, a brow primer and conditioner. While there have been eyelash serums in the marketplace on the time, there have been few brands focused on brows.

“It just took off,” she said. Plain then released the Universal Brow Pencil, formulated with a creamy pomade to fill within the brow. “It’s our number-one selling product thus far and all the time has been.”

Billion Dollar Brows saw growth in 2020, she said: “We closed our yr as our strongest yr yet.”

Big names in brow include Anastasia Soare of Anastasia Beverly Hills, who parlayed her signature Golden Ratio brow technique right into a billion-dollar beauty brand and social media superstardom status.

“By ’94, I had a line outside of each celebrity you may consider,” she said. “I used to be working 16 hours a day six days per week, sometimes seven. On Sundays, I used to do house calls.”

A big change within the industry throughout the years has been the influence of social media and the way it has morphed and accelerated trends in brows, she said.

Young consumers are experimenting greater than ever, like removing the wing of their brows for a #foxeye look, as popularized on TikTok, or choosing the “feathered” style — which was made fashionable by celebrity brow artist Kristie Streicher of Striiike. In terms of services, consumers can now get semi-permanent shaped brows using the lamination technique, a perming treatment that keeps a glance on for six to eight weeks, or microblading, which is more invasive and lasts one to 2 years.

“It’s human nature that folks get bored and need to mess around with their brows, but all of us which have passed through all of the trends of brows know higher,” Streicher said. “It takes a protracted time to grow back or may never grow back.”

Though she’s now based in L.A., she moved to Recent York City in 2001, when thinner brows were the trend. Coming from Northern California, she brought natural, fuller brows to town and to her clientele.

“It’s like eyelashes,” she said. “The more eyelashes that you will have, the younger and delightful you look. Same thing with eyebrows…I even have [clients] grow the hair and work with what they’ve got and embrace whatever it’s that they’ve, whether or not they’ve over-tweezed — how one can cultivate the perfect shape working with what hair they’ve and tools like pencils — or have a large unibrow.”

Embracing individual beauty is where the industry has been heading. And it’s the motto at TooD Beauty, founded by CEO Shari Siadat — who makes a degree of celebrating the unibrow.

“I grew up in a really small town in Massachusetts,” she said. “I had lower than 3,000 people in my town. I prefer to say that I grew up in a sea of blond hair and blue eyes. I loved fidgeting with Barbie, too, so I definitely thought having dark hair there was something quite different about me. Before I actually had a possibility to actually understand how different I looked, my classmates made it quite apparent to me that I looked different than them.”

She was bullied for her darker skin, unibrow and “just my overall hairiness,” she said. “All I desired to do was slot in.”

In her teens, she removed the unibrow, made her eyebrows “as thin as humanly possible” and bleached her facial and body hair.

“I did anything I could do to look increasingly American, Euro-centric, to suit the norm of what I saw within the media,” she said. “I used to be obsessive about it.”

Things modified after she had her third child. While her first two daughters were blond and blue-eyed, her youngest daughter was her spitting image — which kicked off a turning point. Becoming a mother made Siadat reflect and adjusted her standpoint. “If my kids don’t see a lady who really loves herself, they really don’t have a probability.”

She let her eyebrow hair grow, and it felt liberating. She hopes to supply the identical together with her brand, TooD, a clean d-to-c color cosmetics line launched in January with products just like the Brow Color Cream (made in daring colours) that may be worn anywhere on the face or body. There aren’t any rules, Siadat said.

“TooD is brief for attitude,” she added. “It’s about understanding and honoring that at any moment you’ll be able to pivot and you will have the chance and agency to vary how you are feeling about yourself, change what you think that is a beauty standard of the way you wear makeup, where you wear makeup and who it’s for.”