What are Volume Eyelash Extensions | How to Pick the Best Lashes for Your Volume Lash Sets
In case you missed it, we recently published posts detailing everything you need to know about classic eyelash extensions and everything you need to know about hybrid lash extensions, so we thought it was about time we let you in on (almost) everything you need to know about volume lash extensions!
First, What Are Volume Lashes?
Volume eyelash extensions originated in Russia – hence the name Russian Volume – in 2011, featuring a technique developed by Olga Dobronravova who used 0.07 lashes to make the first fans that we’d recognise today. Before that, it was common for lash technicians to apply multiple lash extensions one by one to each natural lash to create a volumized look, typically in what we’d now call 2D volume.
Before that it was most common for ‘volume’ lashes to actually be cluster lashes, which is one of the things that gave eyelash extensions and premade lash fans a bad name back in the day. Thankfully, that’s all behind us now and volume lash extensions are so light on the natural lashes you barely know they’re there!
Russian Volume came to be defined by a super neat and even lash line, which was achieved by dropping down 1mm as you go up a layer, so that when your client opens their eyes, they have a very even top line.
Once volume lash extensions made it to the US, they entered their rebellion era and paid no attention to layers, lengths and lash lines, coining the term Hollywood Lashes. These days, volume is volume, those super neat top lines are a skill in themselves and are still worth learning how to do to help you create eyeliner effects, or to make spikes stand out all the more, but wispy volume lashes have well and truly stolen everyone’s hearts!
Which Lashes Should You Use for Volume Lash Extensions?
Like with classic lashes (and everything else lash related!), there are lots of different thicknesses available for volume lash extensions – by thickness, we mean the diameter of the lashes taken from the bottom. A 0.20 lash extension is 0.2mm in diameter, for example. Let’s have a quick breeze through each of the thicknesses used in volume lash extensions.:
0.10 are most typically used for very light classic lash sets, but they can also be used for 2D eyelash extensions to create a light and fluffy volume set, or in wispy hybrid lash sets.
0.07 is probably the most commonly used thickness for volume lash extensions as they can be used to create fans up to 5D, and while they’re still tricky to get the hang of, they’re certainly the easiest volume thickness for beginner lash technicians to learn to fan with.
0.06 is a slightly more unusual thickness – they look pretty similar to 0.07 but you can create fans up to 8D with them.
0.05 sit sort of between regular volume and mega volume lash extensions. You can create fans up to 12D with them.
0.04 lashes are super fine and will give you a really dense look when used for mega volume – create fans up to 19D with these, then sit back and admire the fluff!
0.03 are the finest lashes on the market. Technically, you can create fans up to a whopping 35D, but are you going to sit and count out 35 teeny tiny little lashes? No, and we'd honestly advise not using any fans of that size on anyone anyway. What it does mean is that you can be safe in the knowledge that you can be pretty liberal when it comes to creating larger fans with 0.03 lashes.
How Can You Calculate Whether A Fan is Safe?
You’ll probably have noticed that the increase in safe fan size between 0.03 and 0.04 lashes is huge, so how can that be? When our founder Hanna Putjato was putting together her Russian Volume training manuals back in 2013, she set about questioning exactly this – how can we be sure the fans we’re using on our clients are safe?
At the time, Russian Volume was in its infancy and hadn’t even made its way to the UK in the form of something that was being taught, so Hanna sat down to work out a little extra theory behind the practice which she could pass on to her students, ensuring that they were not only creating lash sets that looked stunning, but which were also safe.
To work this out, she set about checking the volume of a 0.05 lash compared to a 0.15 lash, for example. By volume in this case, we mean how much space is inside something, and not the size of the fan (confusing, I know). If you take a 0.15 classic lash, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s equivalent to 3 0.05 lashes, after all, 5x3=15, right? Well sure, but when it comes to spacial volume, you can fit significantly more 0.05 lashes inside of a 0.15 lash, as you can see in the post above.
With each of these fan sizes, we’ve calculated how many lashes can ‘fit inside’ a 0.18 lash, which is the maximum classic lash thickness that’s safe to use for the vast majority of your clients (of course, if you’d use a thinner classic lash for a client, you can drop down to smaller fans as necessary).
