If a woman does not wear false eyelashes to an important event, she is incomplete. It appears that mascara alone is still insufficient to sustain their look. However, did you know that fake eyelashes have an interesting backstory?

False eyelashes will always be a useful accessory for adorning the face. This little aesthetic item serves a useful purpose. Only a set of fake eyelashes can make a woman’s face look more elegant, different, appealing, and not boring to look at. So, where did these fake eyelashes originate?

For millennia, women have used cosmetics to enhance their eyelashes. Following that, the eyelashes are dyed, lengthened, and even shortened. It turns out that eyelashes had a significant role in rank and attractiveness in Ancient Egypt that has never altered.

Either men or women in Ancient Egyptian and Roman civilizations used kohl or black putty composed of lead sulfide that was applied to the eyelashes and the margins of the eyes to artificially color and lengthen their eyelashes.

However, what they do is not only for aesthetic purposes. Whether they understood it or not, the compounds in kohl had antibacterial effects. Their eyeliner regimen performed a remarkable job of protecting their eyes from the eye infections that were so frequent back then.

In the nineteenth century AD, a sex worker created fake eyelashes in the 1880s to shield his eyes from the “body fluids” they frequently met while working. Despite being found by female sex workers, the image of fake eyelashes has no link to sex work at all.

Anna Taylor patented fake eyelashes over 30 years later, in 1911. The next decade was the golden age of eyelash technology, with the development of waterproof eye cosmetics and Revlon spiral mascara. More natural, smudge-free eyelash styles were popular in the 1980s and stayed so until the 2020s, when new forms of eyelash makeup appeared.

False eyelashes were created for the first time in 1916. Surprisingly, it was a great American director, D.W. Griffith, who initially came up with the idea for these false eyelashes. Griffith, who was working on a picture called “Intolerance” at the time, wanted the actress, Seena Owen, to have longer eyelashes than the original to make her appearance on screen more elegant.

As a result, Griffith commissioned a wig manufacturer to be inventive in creating fake eyelashes. To make his first pair of fake eyelashes, the artisan ended up utilizing actual human hair.

Since they are made from real hair, this initial generation of fake eyelashes cannot respond to the force of gravity, making a woman’s appearance seem unnatural. As a result, the usage of fake eyelashes had declined and had been out of favor for more than 30 years.

False eyelashes were popular again in the 1950s because the current form is constructed of plastic material, which may offer a more natural look like the original. Marilyn Monroe was a prominent celebrity who frequently used fake eyelashes at that time. False eyelashes have since become one of the most essential beauty tools for applying makeup.