About Mink Eyelash Extensions

We were trying to take a very serious picture of Calliope to illustrate a very serious conversation. But it’s hard to get a very serious picture of an animal whose sole mission in life is to steal phones. 🤦

Anyway, let’s talk about the fact that people keep putting parts of dead animals on their faces. 🤮 Calliope would like to ask that you stop doing that.

You know mink eyelashes? Those really fluffy, ostentatious eyelash extensions that look breathtakingly gorgeous on 5% of people and absolutely ridiculous on the other 95%? Many people don’t even realize that those are generally sourced from real, abused mink.

When mink coats and mink stoles fell out of favor, the mink farm industry realized they could make a profit from eyelash extensions made from mink fur. The fur farms themselves are exactly the same as they have always been: these intelligent, curious, aquatic animals get jammed into little cages where they barely have space to move, and go their whole lives never being able to swim, play, or explore. At the end of these brutal lives, usually during their first winter, the mink are killed and their skin is ripped from their flesh.

Some of the sellers of mink lashes will deceive customers by claiming that fur is removed from the mink by “gently brushing” them, but anyone who has ever known a mink knows this is nonsense.

Calliope was handled and hand-reared from birth but is so fierce that she can’t even be touched. Do you really think that the stressed out, mass-produced mink raised in tiny wire cages are so friendly that they let people comb them? Come on. 🙄 Besides, even if you could brush a mink, you wouldn’t get much fur off them. They are very clean creatures that groom themselves constantly, leaving almost no loose fur that could be combed off.

So how do you avoid contributing to this cruelty? Well, I promise your eyelashes look great the way they are, but if you really want fake lashes, be sure to buy lashes labeled as vegan and cruelty-free. Even better, get the ones that are biodegradable!

You don’t have to kill an animal to look beautiful.