Meet the Woman Behind LA’s Most Sought-After Lash Extensions

Around the same time, Sahaba started to feel discouraged by her college classes moving to an online format. Without going back and forth to classes, she needed something to fill her time. Getting her lashes done every two weeks proved to be a fun alternative. During her appointments, Sahaba would ask her lash artist how she got into the industry, and she shared how life-changing it has been for her. “[The artist] said she got to meet such amazing, beautiful women every single day that inspired her,” Sahaba recalls. “She was working out of her own private suite, and she was only 18 years old.” 

Suddenly, Sahaba, who was 20 at the time, felt a spark of motivation for the first time since the pandemic began and decided to take classes at an aesthetician school. She quickly fell in love with learning how to apply lashes and bought a mannequin head to practice on. “When you’re getting certified, they only teach you surface-level techniques,” Sahaba says. “All of the styles, you have to come up with yourself, so I watched a lot of YouTube videos on how to do wispy sets and add longer pieces.” Through trial and error, she learned what kinds of curls and placements worked best on certain eye shapes. Sahaba also played off the fact that she doesn’t wear a lot of makeup herself and prefers wispier, natural-looking lash looks. 

After two months, Sahaba was ready to upgrade to practicing her lash extension skills on real people, mostly her neighbors and family members. She didn’t charge them but had one condition: “Bring in a picture of the most beautiful lash set that you’ve ever seen in your entire life, and I’m going to try to recreate this for you.” She’d also ask them what they hated about their past lash extension sets, like irritation, droopiness, heaviness, and discomfort, and did her best to remedy these concerns.