Even if you haven't touched a pair of false lashes since your junior prom, chances are you've probably still heard of Lilly Lashes. That’s because they’re as much of a regular on the red carpet as Kim Kardashian these days, and as visible in your Insta feed as any beauty influencer you can think of. That’s no coincidence: Kardashian, along with other celebrities like Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Cardi B, Kylie Jenner, and Shay Mitchell, are constantly sporting the brand’s mink lashes. But that raises the question: What is Lilly Lashes doing that other lashes aren’t?
Founder Lilly Ghalichi, the Texas-born daughter of immigrants, didn't mean to dominate an industry. In fact, she was more into the law than lashes. “My whole life, I thought I wanted to be this big litigator—until I actually became an attorney,” she tells Glamour. But the buttoned-up environment felt like a total contradiction to who she was. “As a female who’s into fashion and makeup, it was very difficult to have to go to work every day and be told by the partners of my firm that I needed to wear less makeup, or that I needed to dress a little bit…not modestly, but toned down,” recalls Ghalichi.
She left the law firm after three months to begin a now-defunct swimwear line, which caught the attention of producers at Bravo's hit reality show, Shahs of Sunset. Lilly joined the show, where she could be her glammed-up, over-the-top self, in its second season in 2012—which is when the lightbulb went off. Well, technically, it happened when she spent hours in hair and makeup for the show.
"Lashes alone would take 30 to 45 minutes," says Ghalichi. That's because at the time, there were only two options for falsies: human hair, which gave a natural look (a little too much so for Ghalichi) or synthetic, which is the kind most people reserve for Halloween. So she and her makeup artist went the DIY route for Ghalichi to get the dramatic—but not comically large—lashes she wanted. "We would get human hair and glue on three and four different strips," she explains. "So we had to put the strip on, let it dry, put another strip on, let it dry, put a third strip on, let it dry, cut out the strip, and put those pieces in. I thought there had to be a better way."
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