If you’ve been reading my blog for a while (or honestly not that long at all) you may remember my semi-recent posts about how I clean my beauty blenders and makeup brushes. Well, after a visit to a certain not-so-scary Halloween party, I discovered another beauty item that may need cleaning: false lashes! I don’t wear lashes all that often, mostly for special days or just when I feel like it. You obviously don’t have to clean your lashes if you plan on tossing them after one use, but I like to get multiple wears out of each pair of mine if possible. This post will be all about how I clean them in between uses!
It’s actually quite easy and you only need a few supplies for this endeavor:
- tweezers
- a tissue or paper towel to set everything up on
- makeup remover
- a few cotton swabs
- a cup filled with warm soapy water (I just use dish soap)
- and your dirty lashes!
My favorite everyday lashes are Eylure Naturals No. 20 – they’re thin and wispy and I can usually get 3-5 wears out of them before tossing. However, sometimes for other events I need something more dramatic…like Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party. For that, I wore these insanely long and dramatic ones, Eylure’s Definition No. 126:
So obviously start with taking off your lashes – I just wanted to include some pics because I think it looks very weird haha
Here I am looking a bit foolish with just one lash on haha:
Peeling off the other one:
So once you’ve got your lashes off, the first thing to do is grab your tweezers and start peeling off some of the hunks of excess glue. Be very gentle with this, just try to get the biggest globs off if you can. We’re going to do some more tweezing later if necessary.
If your lashes have a thicker band this will be a bit easier. If you have really thin or delicate lashes, you may want to skip this first round of tweezing and go straight to the next step to prevent damaging them.
Here you can see a bit of the difference of before vs. after tweezing: the right lash has had most of its leftover glue pulled off, while the left still has some makeup and glue chunks on there. I’ll also use my tweezers to pull off or straighten any stray hairs that have gone askew.
Here it looks much better:
Once you’ve gotten most of the bigger globs off, get your makeup remover and a q-tip:
…and start going to town on the band of the lashes. You don’t have to be as gentle here but still be careful. Try to scrub off as much of the leftover eyeliner, mascara, shadow, etc. as you can.
Once you’re happy with it, go ahead and drop your lashes into the cup of soapy water! Be careful not to fill it too much so you don’t have to go fishing around for your lashes on the bottom of the cup. I filled mine a little less than 1/3 of the cup.
Let them float happily for a few minutes. Like we’re talking less than 5 – no need to let them soak in there.
After going in the soapy water I like to remove them, rinse the cup and repeat for a few more minutes in clean water just to rinse off a bit.
Once they’ve been in there for just a few minutes, you can pull them back out and if necessary, tweeze off any glue chunks that remain. I didn’t find this step necessary in this particular cleaning, but it really helps to let them soak a little if you had a hard time getting the glue off before. When I’m cleaning more delicate lashes I usually do this step first, to soften them up a bit before going in with the tweezers.
If you need to you can use a q-tip to fish them back out.
Once they’re out I set them out to dry on a paper towel or tissue for a little bit and they’re squeaky clean!!
They won’t take long to dry because they’re so thin but I just left mine out overnight because I was going to bed anyway. They looked so good after a thorough cleaning!! I put them back on the tray ready to be worn again.
And that’s literally it!! It’s pretty easy and not too time consuming, honestly the most tedious part is tweezing off all the glue. Fake lashes can be quite intimidating but once you get the hang of it I think they’re so much fun! I love wearing them just for fun some days – it really adds just the perfect little touch to make your eyes pop 🙂 If you’ve been wondering if it’s possible to clean your lashes I hope you found this post helpful! Thank you for reading as usual <3
xo! Kaela
