Despite her post-holiday blues, Christa D'Souza has made an exciting discovery in the eyelash enhancing department
I can’t talk, I can’t write, please don’t make me. After three weeks in Mykonos of drinking at very least one bottle of rose (yesterday it was easily one and a half) a day, not doing a scrap of exercise and having a couple of mini magnums every night after supper as a matter of course, I feel the size of bus and can’t bear to look at myself in the mirror anymore. The only thing I don’t mind looking at are my eyelashes, which are so plump and juicy at the mo, they look almost fake. What? Rose and mini magnums make ones eyelashes fat too? Don’t be silly. This is the result of lumigan, or Latisse as they call it in the States, a prescription-only solution used to treat glaucoma patients until it was discovered that one side effect was to make eyelashes grow like weeds.
Now, if you are like me and born with stumpy, mean eyelashes which no amount of mascara or She Umera curling is going to improve, you start looking around for solutions. Good Eyelashes, like good eyebrows are so pivotal, more pivotal, in a way, than a good bikini body, if you live in a place like the UK, it could be reasoned.
So. For a while I was hooked on individual falsies, but a) they can become an addiction, because when they’re out they make your own look worse than before and b) I got tired of people asking if they were actually mine (what’s the elegant answer to that? ‘Some of them’?)
Because I’d heard that another side effect of Lumigan/Latisse/Bimatoprost .03% is that it can turn light eyes dark, I’d always steadfastly resisted using it. Even if Brooke Shields WAS Latisse’s poster girl in the US (and she went to Princeton so she’s not going to promote anything duff, is she?) ,you don’t want it making your green or blue eyes brown (permanently, not temporarily), do you. Plus, it felt weird asking my GP for a glaucoma medication. Frivolous if not to say a little fraudulent. But then I talked to ‘The Oracle’ Dr Tapan Patel who said he’d prescribed it a hundred times over (well maybe not a hundred) and had never had anyone coming back complaining o their irises changing colour. Thus, I got my prescription and started using it, say, a month ago, applying it to the lash line of my upper and lower lids (not inside but outside) every single night, no exceptions. Scroll forward to now, and well, like I said, I may have a paunch but I also got big fat Beyonce lashes (slightly lighter at the tips, maybe because of the sun). And they are all, every single one of them, my own!
If the idea of it still slightly scares you, I understand. It took me a good year to come round to the idea and who knows, maybe the colour of my eyes will change eventually if I keep using it. What I would recommend for you understandably wary folk, is Revitalash, a popular lash enhancing serum which I was using before making the leap to Lumigan, does not require approval from the FDA and can be bought over the counter (I got mine from Daniel Hersheson in Harvey Nicks) . It works very well, does Revitalash, noticeably well, but it was the full fat Lumigan which made them go insane.