By Susan Milius
Here’s one aerodynamics research finding no supermodel should miss: Long, luscious eyelashes can, in fact, get too long.
There’s a sweet spot in the range of lash lengths —about one-third the width of the eye —reports David Hu of Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Eyelashes much longer than that funnel airflow and grit into the eye instead of deflecting about half of it. And lashes that are too stubby offer too little protection. Those conclusions emerge from computer simulations, measuring the lashes of animals and experiments in a custom-built slightly windy tunnel, Hu and colleagues report February 25 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.