Two generations ago, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), run by one of my heroes, Dr. John Higginson, created conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. The U.S. Surgeon General's report in 1964 had sounded the alarm but IARC in 1986 was another matter entirely. This was a group so scientifically conservative and comprehensive they were last to agree that cancer has a hereditary link. They needed more evidence.
When they declared smoking a class 1 carcinogen, tobacco companies trembled and predatort lawyers cackled like Scrooge McDuck on a pile of gold coins. Both knew the lawsuit would be devastating.
IARC became famous but it did something horrible to epidemiology; it made every statistical grifter want to declare companies 'the next Big Tobacco' and sign a lucrative expert witness contract for lawyers who would sue. Harvard School of Public Health began pushing out monthly where Scary Chemicals are "correlated" to disease alternating with Miracle Foods "linked" to longevity. The federal government kept throwing more and more money at them for doing it and called that "science" funding.
Their greed and manipulation of media are why Andrew Wakefield's epidemiology claims about vaccines cause autism caused Democrats to deny their kids vaccines from 1998 to 2021. And cause Republicans to deny their kids vaccines from 2021 to now.
It also leads to ridiculous claims like that President Trump being elected increased fertility, vaping causes cancer despite having no carcinogens, and weedkillers do also, even though plants are not little people and we don't have the biological pathway that weedkillers act upon.
Now they can claim your fake eyelashes cause demodicosis - parasites living in your eyes. Like all epidemiology claims, it has an air of Truthiness, just like when Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) trotted out documents claiming coffee caused breast cancer, but it derives from the same premise that had people taking horse dewormer for COVID-19; a solution in search of a problem.
Like all observational claims, this is not science, regardless of what corporate media will suggest. It is only EXPLORATORY. Statistical significance they declared after looking at rows and columns of products and diseases.(1) You can quite literally show coin flips are biased against heads using that method. Or biased against tails. And get it published in an epidemiology journal if you change 'coin flips' to something biased editors want to believe, like 'Democrats', and the outcome to something they also want to believe, like 'have prettier daughters'.
The presentation at the 44th Congress of the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons claims "there is growing evidence suggesting that this procedure may create problems on the surface of the eye, including irritation, dry eye symptoms, and meibomian gland dysfunction” but if you want to be scientifically literate, keep in mind when you read terms like "growing evidence" and "emerging evidence" it is such a small number of papers that no one takes it seriously.
Demodex folliculorum mites
This is a small, non-representative survey of young women, nearly half of whom reported "discomfort" and 60 percent of whom reported eyelash extensions. They got samples of eyelashes from 25 women and 24 had Demodex folliculorum skin mites. There was no control group.
Credit: Tetiana Zhmud / ESCRS. License: CC BY-SA
It doesn't matter, to activists that means eyelashes cause parasites. Except the authors are careful not to claim causation; doing that in the notes is a common tactic of epidemiologists. They know media will do it for them, which is why after IARC was hijacked by activists and now claims bacon and hot tea causes cancer, they note it is only correlation and count on media claiming the causation.
That is why this claim may take off, though. No one stopped drinking coffee or eating toast and bacon because of IARC. The science world knows they changed their rules for panelists so that anyone has ever consulted for a "corporation" is banned, meaning the best epidemiologists are excluded. Only the ones who consult for environmental groups remain. Which is why they were caught signing contracts with lawyers to sue before a monograph claiming a link to cancer was published.
No one took the guy who claims wheat harmed your brain seriously, just like no one took Andrew Wakefield seriously when he claimed vaccines cause autism, but in both cases media published it, conspiracy-minded progressives who distrust science latched onto it, books were published about it, and then products rolled out to support believers.(2)
And anti-science progressive declared jihad against makeup decades ago. Fake eyelash concern would sell well to their base, who flipped to the Republican party (Make America Healthy Again - MAHA) when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. did. When the solution, if the problem exists, is simply better eye hygiene.
The problem activists who want to monetize this like they do most epidemiology will be that media and partisan academics will no longer rationalize it, the way they did vaccine denial on the California coast being greater than all Republican states combined a decade ago. That lingering bias is actually a good thing for public health; at least until those anti-science beliefs are taken up by the Democratic party again.
Abstract ID: PP01.04, ‘Eyelash extensions and Demodex folliculorum: influence on eyelid microenvironment and ocular surface health’, Tetiana Zhmud et al, Ocular surface 1, 09.15 hrs BST, Saturday 12 September, https://pagv3.virtual-meeting.org/escrs/escrs2026/en-GB/pag/session/981…;
NOTES:
(1) Gullible people believe that everything causes cancer. Because they read WebMD. Smart people know everything also prevents cancer. Because they read us.
(2) Though gluten-free products have been wonderful for Celiac patients. For everyone else, they think they are healthier ingesting xantham gum over gluten because they found a naturopath to agree they had a reaction to bread.
