Is there a legitimate association between having long eyelashes and allergies? My mom mentioned this to me and I thought it sounded ridiculous, but I do see it has been studied before, though I’m not sure of the quality of the data. As a (recovering) PhD scientist, I’m truly stumped! My 7-month-old son has the most gorgeous eyelashes, but he also has an immense amount of infantile allergies (aka intolerances).
—Anonymous
This is a fascinating question, and I had never heard of it before.
The idea goes back in the research literature to at least the 1970s, with a paper entitled “Recognizing the allergic person.” This paper abstract indicates that you can recognize the allergic person by various signs: “A gaping expression, clearing of the throat and rubbing or mashing of the eyes and nose may indicate significant rhinitis. Dark circles and bags under the eyes, long, silky eyelashes and injected conjunctivas are other signs.”
As a person with pollen allergies, I’m somewhat affronted by the “gaping expression” and “mashing of the eyes,” although I cannot necessarily reject the truth of it. The “long, silky eyelashes” are mentioned here, but the paper doesn’t go on to present any data to support the claim.
There is, however, at least one paper that tried to test this with data. Published in 2004, this paper measured eyelash length in children with and without nasal allergies. The authors found that lash length was longer (9.43 millimeters versus 8.45) in the children and adolescents with allergic rhinitis (that’s nasal allergies) than those without. This difference is statistically significant, although it is worth noting that there is no health or functional benefit to long eyelashes (I say defensively, as a medium-eyelash-haver).
The paper argues that it’s really nasal allergies that are correlated — they do not find that people with both nasal and other allergies have especially longer eyelashes. So this finding may be less relevant to your baby’s food intolerances.
Even with this study, I’m a bit skeptical. We know that there can be bias in what gets published in journals, and I am sure it is much easier to publish a paper that has a significant finding here than one that does not. As I have discussed before, the problem of “p-hacking” is always with us. For this reason, I’d like to see more data before drawing any very strong conclusions.
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I’ll just add anecdotal data in case it helps: I have very long lashes (they get in the way of sunglasses all the time) and have no allergies. My son inherited my lashes and also has no allergies.