Great mascara brands may soon find themselves at risk of women no longer buying their products – at least, not if the recently approved by the FDA drug really does what they say it does. Allergan, the company that also brought Botox on the market, has just announced that the Food and Drug Administration approved Latisse, a newly developed drug, for commercial use in the US. 

Reuters reports that Allergan came upon the ingredients for Latisse somehow by mistake, as researchers noted that an ingredient in the glaucoma treatment Lumigan had as side-effect a lengthening and intense coloring of eyelashes. The ingredient, bimatroprost, was then taken and further studied, to be later put at the basis of Latisse.

The new miracle drug works in a very simple way: if applied daily at the base of the hairs, it stimulates their growth, makes them thicker and blacker. This way, after a few weeks of treatment, it is believed that use of mascara daily would no longer be necessary as women would get approximately the same results with the drug. There is a downside to this, sadly - the effects of Latisse will gradually fade away once treatment is discontinued. What this means is that, once use of the drug is interrupted, the eyelashes will eventually return to the way they were before treatment.

So far, no pricing for the upcoming drug has yet been mentioned, so it’s pretty hard for analysts to estimate how much of a hindrance this “if” will be for women. Allergan, however, is extremely optimistic about how the drug will perform on the market, economic crisis and all, saying that it expects sales of it to go beyond $500 million a year, without setting a specific timeframe for when that may come to happen.  

“In this cautious environment, every approval through the FDA should be viewed positively. […] We believe the opportunity for Latisse could be much larger, but we still need to do more work on this largely unpioneered market,” Gary Nachman, an analyst at Leerink Swann, says to Reuters, echoing the previous statements coming from Allergan.