The World First 3D Printed Eyelashes
Year
Ongoing since 2024
My Role
Director of Product | Product Development Lead @OPT Industries
FMEA, DFM, Product Development, Resource Allocation, Computational Design, Design Direction, Process Development, Design Transfer, Patent Writer
The first fully 3D-printed false eyelash, developed with TAD Beauty over a nine-month cycle that spanned a new photopolymer formulation, a microstructured fiber geometry, and a production line capable of shipping at retail volume. Launched September 2024; over 15 million segments shipped in 2025 across 56 SKUs, manufactured in the United States on six dedicated roll-to-roll photolithography systems.
The result automates a category that has always been hand-assembled — replacing a labor-intensive manual process with a continuous automated line, and bringing false-lash manufacturing back to the U.S. for the first time.
Patent: WO2025175058A1, Additively Manufactured False Eyelashes (Ou, Chu, Lu, Lau).
Conventional lash manufacturing is a hand process. Every new shape — a different curl, length, taper, or density — means retraining workers and, in some cases, retooling. New SKUs are expensive; iteration is slow; customization at scale is effectively impossible.
We built the opposite. The entire lash family lives inside a parametric model — built on the same technology stack OPT uses across its product lines — where every design variable is exposed as an input: curl radius, fiber count, fiber length distribution, taper profile, etc. Tuning a parameter regenerates the full part and its support structure and its cartridge in a single pass, producing a print-ready file the production line can run without human intervention between design and machine. The design file is the production file. The model is the factory.
The result is SKU velocity that doesn't exist anywhere else in the category. 35 new SKUs launched in 2025 alone, each one a parametric variant rather than a new tool — and a path, when the market asks for it, to lashes designed to the millimeter for a single customer's eye shape.
Fully Customizable
Digital-to-Physical Workflow
Engineered
Support Structure
Reaching production required 100+ material iterations and a DOE-driven yield campaign that lifted strip-lash yield from 55% to 91%+.
The harder problem was the support structure. In most additive workflows, supports are scaffolding — necessary during printing, discarded the moment the part is freed. We designed ours to stay. The black lattice cartridge you see on the retail shelf isn't packaging added after the fact; it's the support structure itself, printed in the same pass as the lashes it carries. The same geometry that stabilizes each segment on the build surface becomes the tray a customer peels from. Support structure becomes packaging; packaging becomes part of the product.
