It can be hard to wrap your mind around fake eyelashes. I’ve worn contact lenses since the 6th grade and am, at this point, so used to touching my eyeball that one would think applying a thin layer of glue to my lashline and then a strip of fringe on top of it would be no big deal—and yet (and by now, you’ve probably realized there’s almost always an ‘and yet’), I can’t do it right. At all. Ever. Maybe once? That one time I did it maybe close-to- right I am certain I spent the entire evening worried that one had made a break for it and was hanging from my cheekbone like some deranged caterpillar. The individual lashes are way too difficult for my expertise level (which is, clearly, low); extensions take forever and, I worry, pull your real eyelashes out when they go. It all started to seem like the juice wasn't worth the squeeze, so I gave up on false eyelashes (unless applied by a professional, in which case, yes please! Lay it on me!).

But of course, I get an eyeful of the beauty for spring (Marc Jacobs, Moncler Gamme Rouge, Louis Vuitton this morning), and all I want are those thick, full, somehow simultaneously sexy and chic,wantonly unreal eyelashes. But without looking like I’m wearing a costume. Yes, I'm batty for lashes. Which is why, when I saw Too Faced’s Better Than False Lashes Extreme!, well, I had to at least try it.

The system consists of two tubes of product and three steps. Steps 1 and 3 are the same product, the ‘Activating Mascara Base & Top Coat,' which you apply like a normal mascara before and after you unleash all the ungodly weirdness of Step 2: the nylon lash fibers. These are essentially a tube of fluffy movie snowflakes with a mascara wand, and for all my eye-touching bravado, I was a little hesitant to wave them around my eyeballs—but wave them around I did!—and they stuck to the base coat, sort of like Colombia’s national export sticks all over Al Pacino in Scarface. Then, on goes the topcoat, and I have to tell you, it doesn’t feel like it should work, but it works. Your eyelashes are suddenly freakishly long (like, tickling your eyebrows long), your eyes are Bambi where’s-my-mom?-doe-like, and nobody has to know that there’s a whole mess of loose nylon spores holding the things together with some paint. I ran around in the rain post-application and lost nary a fiber. Better than false lashes? These might be the real deal.

—Alessandra Codinha