Sage flew to Cancún for her best friend's wedding, and by the time she got through airport security, she was already over it. She'd packed her holy-grail lash glue — a $30 tube she'd used for a year — but it didn't make the cut for her carry-on because she'd left it in her checked bag? No, she'd actually put it in her clear liquids pouch, but the TSA agent still said the tube looked "oversized" and made her toss it. She stood there in shock, watching that little gray bin take away her entire lash game. No glue, no lashes, no point.
Then there was the hotel-room disaster. She tried to salvage the trip with a pair of strip lashes she'd nestled in a cotton ball inside an old contact-lens case. But unfolding them, the lash band snapped in the middle, bent into a weird L-shape that she tried to fix with a hair straightener — which, predictably, melted the corner into a gooey crimp. The bathroom had one of those dim, warm vanity lights that made her eyes look half-closed, so she ended up gluing one lash to her eyelid and the other one to her finger. She had to peel it off with tweezers, and then the humid air made the glue tacky and stringy, like hairspray on a bad Monday. She gave up, wiped everything off, and went to dinner with bare lashes and a lump in her throat. "I stared at the vacation photos later and all I could see was a blurry-eyed stranger," she says. "It just didn't feel like me."