This article was taken from the Professional Beauty archives, and was originally published in October 2014.
President and innovator of the 3D Volume Hollywood Eyelash Extension technique, Irina Levchuk gave Professional Beauty magazine the inside scoop on her world-renowned technique and how she became the eyelash queen.
There are few more interesting people you’ll meet in the beauty world than Irina Levchuk.
A bored lawyer turned eyelash extraordinaire, and the woman responsible for bringing the 3D Volume Hollywood Eyelash Extension technique to the world, she’s married to Russia’s head of Sephora and can teach you more about eyelashes in five minutes than most of us will learn in a lifetime.
Irina can teach you more about eyelashes in five minutes than most of us will learn in a lifetime.
So it was only natural that we leapt at the chance to pick the brains of the 3D Russian Volume Lashes queen herself when she landed in Sydney recently. Here’s what we learnt from the lash legend…
How did you become interested in eyelashes?
“I actually started my career as a lawyer! It was pretty boring, and then seven years ago, I was in Singapore and I found the girls there had the most beautiful lashes. We didn’t really have anything like them at the time in Russia, and what we did have was very expensive. So I tried the lashes in Singapore and realised they were cheaper, faster to apply and more comfortable to wear.”
“It was in that moment I realised this was what I wanted to be doing. I wanted to run my own line of salons that specialised in lashes like these, which were completely new for the market, at least in my country.”
“When I got back I told my husband, and the first thing he said to me was that eighty per cent of sales in beauty and cosmetics that he sees are all mascara and eye products. He thought I was really on to something! Girls will not eat, but they will spend the last of their money buying mascara, so they can have beautiful lashes.”
How did you go from a lawyer with no beauty background to one of the world’s leading lash experts?
“I spent three years visiting over thirty eyelash schools all over the world to learn the most effective and cutting edge techniques. I collected all the best tricks and started to create my own hybrid technique to improve on the past stock-standard technique.”
Where did you source the lashes from to create the Russian 3D Volume Lashes look?
“South Korea. They had the most beautiful quality. But what I do is so much more about technique then the lashes themselves.”
What is the secret to the Russian 3D Volume Lashes look?
“In the last three years, manufacturers have started producing extraordinarily fine lashes. So fine in fact that some are actually thinner than real lashes, so it’s allowed us to create the most natural, soft and beautifully voluminous look. We can put a few lashes to each natural lash. We fan them like a beautiful bouquet to lashes. One natural lash can have up to six faux lashes applied. In the past, if someone wanted thick lashes, they’d just apply large, thick lashes, which would end up looking like spider legs.”
Did you ever expect the 3D Volume Hollywood Eyelash Extension technique to explode the way it has?
“Not at all. First it was just one person inviting me to teach what I knew, then there were others, then before I knew it everyone was talking about it. Now everyone wants to know how to do it. It’s really the future of eyelash extensions.”
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