Quote - ...amd here is what I use for most of my characters. As you see the diffuse color is not black. If I want it to look black I use a kind of very dark gray. For Antonia I use a dark brown, a color that looks pretty natural if you are not going for a mascara look or want it to go together with an asian or african/afro-american character.

I confess that I am unsure if it makes any sense to plug the texture into the transparency edge channel as well (as more as I set it to 0.0) - I think this part of the settings is a fossil or something like that that I carry around with me.
 

But anyway: The trick is to choose a paler version of the color you use in the diffuse channel for the specular color.
I am sure that some of you are able to come up with something more clever (or an advanced version) but I thought that this may be worth a look.

very good lashes IMO. the problem i see in other lashes is that there are to many. if we look at some ipcs from real people we can see that there are not 100 lashes. but under 50. 
looks very realistic