Lattes and Lashes: How Caffeine Affects Your Lash Sets and Why Coffee Should Come After Lashes
Like many Lash Technicians, we love cold brew oh so much. The thing is though, that caffeine can play havoc with your lash sets, whether it’s you enjoying it, or your clients. It seems that coffee is such a staple to so many of us to help perk us up first thing in the morning or even for a long afternoon of lashing, but what are the drawbacks of that, and what should we do to combat them?
Attention
A small amount of caffeinecan have positive effects, such as improved reaction time or even boosted memory function. For some of us though, it has a bit too much of an effect and can lead to our thoughts being scattered and our attention wandering from task to task. This definitely isn’t ideal while you’re applying lashes and it doesn’t help you to run a business effectively either. If you’re a little bit sensitive to caffeine, it’s worth seeing if you can find a low or no-caffeine alternative to your fave coffee, or swap it out for an energizing tea, or even water.
Steady Hands
Similar to the previous point, caffeine can cause your hands to shake, which doesn’t help at all with applying eyelash extensions accurately. Bear in mind as well that sometimes medications or even supplements can change the way your body reacts to caffeine, so if you’re starting any new kind of treatment, tread lightly when it comes to caffeine consumption.
Flickering Eyes
This is where caffeine’s effects on your clients becomes a problem. Flickering eyelids after consuming caffeine is super common, even for those who don’t seem to have any kind of reaction to caffeine. Generally speaking, this isn’t something you’d notice, but if you’re trying to apply lash extensions to flickery eyes, you’re going to have a few hurdles to try and overcome.
The first issue is that it’s even more difficult to apply lashes to what is essentially a moving target. This makes your attachment less perfect and also means that your lash sets take longer.
The other issue is that flickering eyelids mean that the eyes aren’t properly closed during treatment, making them far more likely to get chemical burns. While chemical burns are common and typically go down by themselves within a few days of treatment, they don’t look too cute, and they don’t feel good either.
It’s best to advise clients to avoid caffeine for at least an hour prior to their appointment so that they’re less likely to have flickering eyes. Ideally, if they can avoid caffeine altogether before lash appointments, they’ll be doing themselves and you a massive favor.
Dehydration
As it turns out,this isn’t as much of an issue as we’ve been led to believe when it comes to coffee specifically. You need to be drinking A LOT of coffee per day to really notice a diuretic effect from caffeine, but even so, you’re going to be doing yourself way more favors by focusing on your water intake.
Dehydration often leads to headaches, a lack of concentration, and general lethargy – none of which contribute to a good performance where lashing is concerned.
Staying hydrated boosts your concentration levels, helps you sleep better at night, and also helps keep your skin clear. It’s really important that you drink plenty of water throughout the day – nothing ruins a good mood, good sleep, or good business like feeling lethargic. Staying hydrated helps with that.
If you're looking to increase your water consumption, you might want to check out the London Lash x Stanley Cup that holds 890ml of water, keeps your drink cool all day long, and has a leaf-proof flip straw!
Laura’s (Decaf) Iced Coffee
If I may address you directly for a while, I’ll be quite happy to share with you the way that I make my coffee in the summer. I know, I know, all this talk about avoiding coffee, but hydration isn’t all about water, and there’s no reason you can’t have things that you enjoy. By making your own drinks you can control exactly what goes into them, so you have a good idea of how much liquid you’re consuming, and can limit caffeine and sugar.
Firstly, if you want a cup that’s actually perfect for iced coffee (trust me, this is tried and tested), you couldgrab our Lash Baddie Tumbler, which holds 750ml of liquid (less if you include ice cubes, of course) and keeps your drink gloriously cool for hours and hours at a time! Here’s my recipe for the nicest iced cold brew coffee, which I basically live off of in the summer, and which lives rent-free in my mind when it’s slightly too chilly to be drinking iced drinks.
This works best if you can grind your own coffee beans, but if you can’t, grab some ground coffee and add enough to aFrench Press (a cafetière, if you’re fancy) for twice as much per cup as you’d normally add. I will add a note here that it’s better to use decaf, for the reasons I’ve gone into above, but also because cold brew ends up being WAY stronger than hot brewed coffee. It also tastes nicer, so it’s well worth the wait. We’re going for strength of flavor here, and we’re using way less coffee per cup, so it is still cost-effective where your coffee use is concerned. I digress.
Once you’ve added your ground coffee, fill the press with cold water from the tap or a water filter – your choice – then cover the press with saran wrap and leave it in the refrigerator overnight. If you can leave it for 24 hours, even better, but it’s going to need at least 8 hours to be good.
In the morning, remove the saran wrap and give the coffee a stir before pressing it. I’d recommend now transferring the coffee to a bottle or some other receptacle so that your last couple of drinks aren’t more bitter than the first, but between you and me, I tend to just leave it in the fridge as it is.
When you’re ready for some cold brew goodness, you want between 15-30ml of coffee in your Lash Baddie Tumbler, depending on how strong you like your coffee. Add your ice cubes – I usually use 4 to 6 cubes – and then top up with milk of your choice. I opt for oat milk because it’s creamier, but it’s just as good with soy milk, in my experience.
To finish, I add a little splash of vanilla extract. Of course, you can use vanilla syrup, but extract doesn’t add any sugar so it’s a good choice here, as sugar can also make your hands shaky and your attention wander.
Now, use your straw to stir, screw on the lid, et voila! Smooth, tasty cold brew coffee in a cute lil cup. What could be better?
All in all, while we love coffee pretty much any day, any time, we do have to take into account the ways that it might impact on our job and our overall performance, and also the way that our clients might behave while they’re with us. Where you can, avoid caffeine yourself, and advise clients to wait until after their lash appointment to get stuck into the caffeine.
