Ok, so I add texture to eyelashes on the head in the material room, because it's always blank,  from the appropriate skin set that I'm using, but I have never ever had a character with eyelashes.  What am I not doing? 

You're not drinking Margaritas in Acapulco? You're not singing sailing shanties?

Perhaps you're not setting the gamma = 1 on the transparency map?

Perhaps you're connecting the transparency map to Transparency, but not turning the Transparency_Falloff to 0, and so it fell off?

It's customary to show us what you are doing. A screen shot of the material (advanced only), and render, are worth more than a thousand words.

I didn't even know I had to do anything with a transparency setting. 

I wouldn't even know how to connect the transparency map to the transparency [there's a transparency?]  let alone what to turn to 0.  This is tinkering in that scary advanced thingy, like with glass, right?  why are eyelashes anything to do with being transparent? Here's what I've been working on [and I'm also disappointed by the skin which looked much more lifelike on the promo picture]

Bagginsbill"s reference to posting an image is showing what is going on in the advanced material room; all nodes open and arranged so as we can see exactly any problems with connections and settings.  As for the overall appearance of your character, there are other things that need to be addressed to improve the render.

Normally, with a store bought skin, the eyelashes are applied as part of the skin and all you have to do is push render.

(To answer your other questions, the model's eyelash is a solid arc of polygons, shaped a lot like a rainbow.   Now, in order to make the eyelashes look realish, we use a transparancy map.  This is a simple black and white image that fits the character's geometry...  the polygons that your male model is made of.     Where the Transparency map is white, the eyelashes appear.)

So...   is the skin made for the model you're using it with?  

If you click Render from the top menus, then Render Settings > Auto Settings is the blue pointer closer to draft or final?

The skin I'm using is a different one because the default [which also had no eyebrows] didn't look right either... but I initially had applied the default texture through pose.  I don't have an image from the advanced material room because I wasn't using it.  I didn't think I ought to have to if I'm using provided textures.  It all showed the proper textures in the material room, including the bump maps.  The eyelashes had NO texture at all when I clicked them default or no, so I picked them out of the browse. 

Ok...   I'd have expected you to get eyelashes if you applied the skin by clicking an Icon from pose.

Eyelashes generally don't have a texture applied, just a diffuse color and the transparency.  They should look a lot like this in the material room...

And just for future reference, the Advanced Material room is just a different (and potentially more confusing) way of looking at this information.  

ok, thanks, I'll check for the transparency map....  I've used them on clothes and accessories before. this is a lot scarier than the advanced settings.  Which I need to learn to use, I guess...

Until you decide to show us what you have, we're not going to solve this.

You may have selected a transparency map for the wrong figure, and so it doesn't fit in the place where the lashes are in the figure's UV map. 

You have have set the transparency amount to a strange number.

You may have connected it to only one of the two inputs.

When I say you, I also mean plural you, like whoever you got it from may have screwed up.

If you're using freebies, there is a good chance the author doesn't know what they're doing, either.

It's 4th of July here and I'm going on the sailboat for the next 36 hours - I hope somebody can help you sort this out, after you post some data about what you have there.

Lol, I'll have to see if I can photograph the screen.  To do screen capture I need somewhere to put the picture and I have trouble running poser and a paint program at the same time... one or both tend to crash. 

Have a great time sailing!

Windows 8 (and maybe 7) don't need a program to take a screen or window shot. OSX also does it without a program.

but you need a paint program to save it in, don't you? otherwise how can you get from taking screen shot to being able to browse it  somewhere where it's saved until you can get on the net, especially as I don't use the net on that machine, only on my laptop.  There is at least a print screen button on that computer, windows 7 might print screen but not when the damn button is on F11 and it obviously does the full screen mode of F11, with no apparent way to get to print screen without an extra program.  I suppose I could close poser after printing screen to put it into PSP, it's just that poser takes several minutes to open... yes, I get impatient. 

Well, it's my turn to use the computer tomorrow, so I'll have a look at all these transparencies...

windows 7 has a snipping tool. You have the screen open that you want to take the shot of. Run the tool. The screen goes whitish. You drag a box around what you want a shot of and then hit save. It's really quite easy.

that sounds fun.  I confess I haven't found my way round all of windows 7 yet and still mourn my XP...

Thanks all, I'm being incredibly stupid this weekend, it's 90degrees F plus here and it's frying my braincell.... I appreciate everyone's patience