Cookie policy

• Your sign-in session — set by our authentication provider only after you sign in, and only so the next page knows it is still you. Without it you would be signed out on every click.
• Your language — a cookie named elc_lang, written only when you press EN, RO or IT, so the site is in the same language when you come back.

That is the whole list. We do not use localStorage or sessionStorage to get around it either: the law is about storing things on your device, not about the word "cookie".

No analytics cookies, no advertising pixels, no social media trackers, no third-party embeds that watch you. Nobody is paying us to follow you around.

How we count visits. Since October 2026 we use Vercel Web Analytics, from the company that already hosts the site. It stores nothing on your device — no cookie, no localStorage — and does not follow you from one site to another or from one day to the next. It records the page you opened, the site that sent you, your country and the kind of device and browser; your IP address is used only to tell visits apart within the same day, through a code that is then discarded. The organiser’s console, the judges’ area and the sign-in pages are not measured, and codes carried in addresses — invitation links, guide links — are cut off before anything is sent.

Until September 2026 we also set a cookie that remembered which invitation link brought you here, so the person who invited you could be credited. It served her reward rather than anything you had asked for, which means it needed your consent — and that would have meant a banner on every page. We removed it instead. Invitation codes now travel in the address, from the invitation link to the sign-up form.

A consent banner is required when a site stores something that is not strictly necessary for the service you asked for. Ours stores nothing of that kind, so asking you to click "accept" would be theatre.

The visit count described above stores nothing on your device, so it does not change that. If we ever add anything that does — an analytics cookie, an advertising pixel — the banner comes first, with a refuse button as easy to press as the accept one, and this page is updated before anything is set.

Any browser lets you delete cookies for a site, and you can block ours entirely. Clearing them signs you out and forgets your language choice; nothing else is lost, and nothing about your entries, your works or your invoices lives in a cookie.

Questions about any of this go to contact@expert-lash.com. What we hold about you, and for how long, is in the privacy policy.