How to Tuesday: you too can have fabulous eyelashes!

Or an alternate title: how to be vain like me!

I've been racking my brain for weeks now, trying to think of something I could do to join in the how-to Tuesday fun with that darling and fabulous Stie.

It finally hit me - I'll tell everyone how I was able to get fabulous eyelashes in just a few months (oh and for just a little bit of money.)

Okay, last Thanksgiving, I asked my niece if she was wearing fake eyelashes because she had the most amazingly long and beautiful lashes.  She said she wasn't but that she had been using Latisse for the past few months.  I decided to give it a try and started up myself the first week of December.

Here's a terrible and slightly scary self-pic of my eyes just so you can get an idea of how incredibly this stuff works.

I know, right?

My lashes before Latisse were normal - short, straight, etc.  My lashes now are still fairly straight but they are longer and thicker too. I do a quick squeeze of an eyelash curler on the tips, apply a little mascara and they look perfect.

It's kind of amazing.  Okay, let's get into the how-to...

Latisse is a prescription medicine.  When you bring the box home and open it up, you'll find a teensy tiny little bottle (appearing much larger here) and a supply of little brushes for you to use to apply the stuff to your eyelids.

Friends, my advice to you is do NOT use the included brushes.  Seriously, do not.  These are cheap brushes that soak up the liquid before you can really get it on your eyelids.  Because this stuff is like liquid gold, you want it to last a long time and not just be soaked up in a throw-away brush.

Instead, buy this $11 brush from your nearest Sephora store.

It's the professional pointed liner/eyeliner brush #17.  After applying, rinse the brush out and set it aside to dry until the next day and that's it.

So every night, wash your face, remove your makeup, apply eye cream, whatever you have to do.  Once you're ready for bed and done doing stuff to your eyes, grab your tiny brush and drop a tiny drop of Latisse on it.  If it starts to drip off the brush because it's such a tiny little thing and doesn't soak up a lot of liquid (and you don't want to lose even a drop of this stuff) then you just let the excess drop back onto the Latisse bottle top.  This way you can use every last drop without it dropping onto your sink or whatever.

Use your tiny little brush to paint the liquid on your upper eyelid, as close to the lash line as possible (use one drop on the brush for each eye.)  I used my cute little Sephora brush and my first Latisse bottle lasted more than four months. 

So I know you're dying to know how much this stuff really costs, right?  Well, one bottle is roughly $100, depending on your pharmacy.  If you use the tiny Sephora brush, you'll feel better about spending all of that money on something so trivial as your eyelashes.  I mean, it works for me, anyway.

I saw results after about six weeks of treatment and you achieve your full lash potential after sixteen weeks of daily application.  I'm now on maintenance and apply Latisse three times a week.

Side effects?  I haven't noticed any.  The two I heard about the most are darker pigment on your eyelids (which I already had) and darker irises (hello, I have dark brown eyes anyway.)  I had one eyelash grow in white, which was a little weird but other than that, nothing but long and lush lashes that make me feel pretty.

And who doesn't want to feel pretty???