Kacey Musgraves will be the first person to admit that her tastes in beauty lean toward over the top. As she puts it, that comes from her Southern roots; Musgraves grew up in small-town East Texas, where beauty queen aesthetics reign supreme, including big lips, big hair, and even bigger lashes. You don't have to look closely to see the former two in action in her red-carpet choices, but few seem to notice that Musgraves's lashes are rarely the same from look to look. That's an intentional move on her makeup artist Moani Lee's part.

"Kacey's been such a warrior for experimentation," Lee tells Allure. "I give her a lot of credit for trusting me and being willing to try new things because when I first started working with her, she wanted double [or] triple layers of lashes; it's been a really fun road to pull it back."

According to her, Musgraves's ever-changing but always dramatic lashes are usually the work of a few different drugstore products and some very elaborate application techniques.

These days, Ardell's wispy strip lashes are Lee's go-to for Musgraves's TV, red carpet, and stage appearances. But you won't find her gluing and sticking them straight to the lash line as you'd expect. "I like to chop the full sets [up] to look like individuals because I like the pattern of the full set," she explains. From there, Lee glues those pieces bit by bit onto Musgraves's eyes and concentrates volume in different places, fully dependent on where she's going and what the lighting will look like.

If Musgraves were performing in a dark arena with bright spotlights, for instance, her lashes would look way different than they would on an evenly lit television set. But most of the time, Lee's instinct is to build volume "from the center out," rather than on the outer corner of the eye, where many lash strips are heaviest.