First there was kohl. That was ancient Egypt, where both men and women used malachite and kohl to darken their lashes, but it took until the 19th century to bottle mascara and start the false-lash trend. Back then, the French began sewing hairs onto their eyelids, and a Canadian in the US patented an early version of “strip lashes,” the familiar crescent of lashes we now buy in pharmacies. Since then, oversized lashes have been intermittently popular—think Twiggy in the 1960s—with the current explosion beginning in the early 2000s, when the Asian eyelash-extension craze began to rip through Hollywood, with celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Paris Hilton cramming into estheticians’ chairs to achieve peak flutter.
During these years, I was living in Los Angeles, and I had a friend who was obsessed with lashes. Sahara Lotti was a screenwriter who was also furiously buying and selling Balenciaga bags. She’d noticed that most of what she saw for sale online was fake, and wrote a manifesto about how to spot it, then sold a PDF of instructions online for five dollars. After that, she started calling around to Barneys and other department stores to order real Balenciagas, flipping them for a higher price on eBay. This sideline faded when she landed a script deal with Fox, but then she started moonlighting as an online intuitive, gathering Hollywood clients before she went on retainer for a member of the royal family of Qatar.
In other words, Lotti was a woman who could spot a...
The Department of the Attorney General says the man claiming to be the state’s chief technology officer at national conferences and on online platforms is not affiliated with the state of Hawaii a...