Lush lashes are something most women hanker after. Long eyelashes help define and shape the eye; Open any beauty magazine and you’ll see it’s all in the eyes – pages of models with eyes cast down or up, the emphasis on her long eye lashes.

There are hundreds of products on the market – mascara, false eyelashes, eyelash extensions to name but a couple of products, but none of these are permanent and can be a nuisance to apply, time consuming and messy. However, there is a new beauty secret – eyelash transplant surgery.

Originally, the eyelash transplant surgery was used in plastic surgery on patients who had suffered facial trauma, perhaps through severe burns or because of congenital malformations of the eye. However, cosmetic surgeons realised that they could capitalise on this expertise and so, they have started to offer eyelash transplants as part of their cosmetic surgery list.

The procedure isn’t cheap, with prices starting around US $5,000. The cosmetic surgery itself is a delicate operation needing microsurgical procedures, with the patient under light sedation and local anesthesia. First of all, about 75-100 hairs are removed from the patient’s head. Each hair is cleaned thoroughly before being threaded onto a needle.

Each eyelid is numbed and swelled. The hair is kept moist and it sown into the top of the eyelid with a crescent-shaped needle, rather like normal sewing. The midpart of the lid is pierced with the needle and the hair is pulled to the outer edge. All in all, the patient can expect to be in surgery for about 4 hours.

For the first few days, there is a lot of swelling and bruising around the eyes, but this goes down in the first week and full recovery is expected in 7-14 days.

Not everyone is suitable for the surgery – African-Americans and people with very frizzy hair are generally not considered suitable because the donor hair does not lend itself well to the surgery. It should also be noted that transplanted hairs will not curl the way normal eyelashes do, so they must be permed if the patient wants the full curl in their eyelashes. However, the transplant eyelashes are living, and therefore continue to grow, so they can be trimmed to the length that the patient wants, meaning they can be grown longer than ‘normal’ eyelashes to achieve that doe-eyed look.