From panda eyes to facial fat loss: The dark side of eyelash serums

“I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror.”

My housemate (and best friend) always wanted long eyelashes. After falling down the before and after rabbit hole on TikTok, she ended up dropping $160 on a popular serum. “I said sign me up, vanity is everything,” she says. “I did it religiously. Probably within a month, I started noticing differences – big differences.”

Suddenly, people were commenting on her lashes on the street and asking for the details of her lash routine. As someone who’s been looking at her face for more than a decade, I noticed as well. They were long.

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But after around six months, she started to notice some discolouration around her eyes. “I started to notice my eyelids were turning super purple. It was so dark, it looked like I had a matte brown eyeshadow on my lids. But hey, the lashes were still looking good.”

The ‘panda eyes’ were only the beginning. Not long after, she noticed the structure of her eyes was changing as well. “They looked more sunken in. Throughout the months, it started to become more and more concerning. It looked like it had changed my eyelid shape and the volume around my eyes.”

The serum she was using contained prostaglandin analogs or PGAs which are a class of drugs that are used for hair growth, among other things, including medical abortions and treating glaucoma. These ingredients are typically found in lash serums as either isopropyl cloprostenate or dechloro-dihydroxy-difluoro-ethylcloprostenolamide (a mouthful, I know).

In Australia, PGAs are prescription-only, but that doesn’t stop many lash-lovers from ordering online, like my friend did. On top of hyperpigmentation and facial fat loss – which can sometimes be permanent, by the way – there are reports of irritation, red eyes and even the iris changing colour. 

While some people who use the serums with PGAs don’t experience any negative side effects, many users do – so many, in fact, that multiple cosmetic companies including Rodan + Fields and GrandeLash have had to pay out millions of dollars in class action lawsuits for failing to properly inform their customers. 

“I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror. It changed my face structure,” my friend tells me. She’s stopped using the serum and is currently looking for products to help restore her lost orbital fat. “It’s just not worth the risk unfortunately ladies.”

While PGAs are a quick way to grow thicker, longer lashes, they’re not the only thing that works. Olivia Epifano, the 24-year-old founder of the eyelash company Lavish Cosmetics, was working as a lash technician when she noticed a lot of people were having bad reactions to their lash serums.

“I found that a lot of people were trying to get off the lash extensions to grow their lashes, but were then coming back for lash extensions because it wasn’t working or because they were finding ‘ my eyes are red’ or ‘my eyes are sensitive’,” she tells me. 

She says if they could handle the strong, potent chemicals in the lash glue, it was probably the PGAs that were causing the problems. “The lash serum was seeping into the eye itself and it also wasn’t safe to sleep with.”

This helped her inform the development of her own lash serum, Lash Illusion, which is made up of 13 vitamins and peptides. She’s also formulated a mascara that’s infused with the serum for day-to-day wear. As well as having a far shorter ingredients list than most other lash serums, it’s also chemical-free, vegan and water-based.

The active ingredients she uses include the keratin-stimulating peptide pentapeptide-17 as well as trusted favourites like biotin, hyaluronic acid and ginseng extract.

“I always say to my customers, especially when I’m doing pop-ups and things like that, I always say ‘Take a photo of the ingredients, go home, go and have a coffee and actually look up each ingredient that’s in the product,” she says. 

While the risks of some serums have left some customers feeling tricked, it’s clear not every product is created equal. Long, luscious lashes are still within reach – just make sure to double-check the ingredients list before adding to cart.

For more on safe lash serum, head here.