Variations in Volume: What to Consider if You’re Looking to Expand Your Volume Lash Collection
If you’ve been in the lash industry for a long time, you’ll have seen different types of eyelash extensions popping up left, right, and center over the years. If you’re new to lashes, you might even be finding navigating the numerous options overwhelming. For a full breakdown of ALL of our lash extensions collections, check out this article, or if you’re ready to get into the nitty gritty of premade lash fans and easy fan lashes, look no further!
Very simply, both premade lash fans and easy fan lashes are variations of regular volume fans. They’re made up of multiple super fine lashes and are fanned out to create a dense volume effect. They were both designed to make your job faster and easier where volume fan creation is concerned, but they each give very different looks and require changes to your lashing technique. Here’s what you need to know.
What are Premade Fans?
Premade lash fans are one of those products where the name does a lot of legwork in explaining what you’re getting – volume lashes that have already been made for you. Back in the 2010s when eyelash extensions were rising in popularity and were only just being learnt about and developed, premade fans were closer to cluster lashes than handmade volume fans and they gained a bad reputation as a result of the damage they caused. As lash education developed, so too did premade fans. They’re now created by using the exact same lashes that you’d use to make your own fans, taking into consideration the safety of the fans as well as the way they look.
These days, premade lash fans are lightweight, bonded with the tiniest amount of glue just so that they don’t break when you pick them up, and are made from the same fiber as our beloved Mayfair collection so you know that they’re also vegan friendly, hypoallergenic and cruelty-free too!
What are Easy Fanning Lashes?
Truth be told, Easy Fan Lashes also have a bit of a poor reputation for a really similar reason to premade lash fans. In the early days of easy fanning lashes, not a lot of thought was put into fan size, and not as much education was really available regarding the size of fan you could safely make. Using fans that are too heavy will weigh the natural lashes down and can cause them to twist and/or fall out prematurely, potentially damaging the hair follicle. We’ve gone into a bit more detail about volume lashes in this post if you’re not sure which fan sizes are safe with each lash thickness.
Easy fan lashes work almost like magic – grab them with your tweezers and they pop open into volume fans. By nature, they create quite narrow fans which can help you to achieve a dense lash look, but if you want a wider fan, just place them back on the strip and wiggle them about a bit with your tweezers until they open up. Easy fan lashes work in the way that they do because they have multiple layers of lashes on each strip which force each other outwards when you grip them with your tweezers, creating volume fans easily.
What Kinds of Lash Looks Can You Expect?
With premades it’s more common to aim for a very even lash line like Russian Volume training used to teach you (and still does, really), but you can, of course, go for a wispy volume look with premade fans simply by playing around with lengths and how you apply them to each layer, just like with handmade volume fans.
Conversely, Easy Fanning Lashes give you a much wispier look by default because they have a mixture of lengths on each strip. You can try to get an even lash line with easy fan lashes, but because of this mixture of lengths you will just naturally have a textured finish to your lash line, with plenty of density in the bottom 2 thirds of the lashes.
We have two types of easy fan lashes – regular Easy Fanning Lashes have 3 lengths on each strip which are 1mm apart (eg. 8,9,10), so give quite a lot of texture and density, while Camellia Easy Fan Lashes have 2 lengths which are 2mm apart (eg. 8,10), so give you even more of a wispy volume look than the regular easy fan lashes.
How to Map With Premades & EFL
You canmap with premade fans exactly as you normally would. They’re just really uniform volume fans, so all you need to do is draw out your lash mapping style and go for it – play around with layers andmixing curls, but ultimately these won’t be out of your comfort zone where lash mapping is concerned.
Easy fanning lashes need a little more thought and tend to overwhelm Lash Techs due to the mixture of the lengths, but they’re easier than they first appear!
- With regular Easy Fan Lashes, you should map according to the middle length, as this is the average length of the lashes in your fan. Your map, then might look a little like this:
- With Camellia easy fanning lashes, map according to the longer of the two lengths to ensure the safety of your clients’ lashes, and to keep them looking really nice.
Do They Really Speed Up Your Work?
They really do! On average, easy fan lashes will reduce the time you spend on your volume sets by around a third, and premade fans can halve your treatment time for a set of volume lashes. If your client arrives late and you don’t have time to give them the volume look that they want as a result, you can use a few premade fans to speed things up – they honestly won’t be able to tell the difference.
To be on the safe side and to ensure you have enough time the first few times you use them, book your clients in for the same time as you normally would for a volume set and see how much time you’re left with. It’s better to have time left over for stickie checks and lash photos than to feel rushed, and it’s also normal to need a little bit of extra time to get used to using something new, so you might even find that your first few sets with either of these types of lashes take longer than they will when you’re more used to them.
Can Volume Beginners Use Them?
In theory yes – they are easier to use than making your fans by hand, but let’s unpack that a little bit.
Premade fans have been created according to what is a safe weight for the vast majority of clients, so you can technically use them even if you’re only trained in classic lashes, however, it’s still better to be educated in the specifics of volume lashes before you start offering them to clients so that you know for a fact that you’re providing a safe treatment.
When it comes to easy fanning lashes, you can use them if you’re a volume beginner, but consider that it’s harder to ensure you’re using safe fan sizes than it is when you’re creating your fans by hand, as the lashes aren’t as easy to separate on the strip as regular volume fans. If you’ve only recently started learning to create volume fans, we’d advise that you master those before you start looking for alternatives and corners to cut – nothing beats a handmade fan in terms of versatility or satisfaction!
All in all, while premade fans and easy fanning lashes are variations on volume lashes, they are very different types of eyelash extensions! They’re different to work with, achieve very different looks, and will appeal to different clients. It’s well worth trying them each out at least once – they might even end up being your new favorite lashes to use for your volume sets, and in thosesets of wispy hybrid lashes that your clients love!
