Brush me up baby...

What makes a makeup brush special? There are tons and tons of makeup brushes out there - synthetics, pony, sable, goat, squirrel - the list goes on and on.
So how is a girl supposed to figure out which brushes she needs, and how to choose amongst all the different brands, styles, price points etc?

Here is what I do. If you are buying online, have a really good look at the brush, if you are in a store, pick it up and really feel it.




How densely packed are the hairs? If there aren't enough hairs, and they're not packed together well, then you will have very little control over the product you're trying to work with.
If it is packed too tightly, it will create lines as it moves across your face.

Do the hairs fall out as you play with the brush? If so the quality is not good enough. Also its a complete nuisance to have to keep picking hairs off the surface of your makeup.

What is the brush made from?
I recommend synthetic brushes to move wet products, like foundation, concealer, cream shadows etc, and hair brushes for use with dry products, like powder shadows, blushes etc.

Many brushes out there are made from dyed fiber or dyed hair. These dyes can come away into your product, can irritate your skin, and generally leave you with a brush that breaks down very quickly. You want the brush to maintain its shape years down the line, and not wind up in the junk pile a couple of months in.

I avoid dyed brushes at all costs.

Top quality brushes don't have to be extremely expensive either. You can buy makeup brushes at a medium price point, and get quality that lasts and lasts. Some of the brushes in my kit are 20 years old. They didn't cost any more than other brushes do, they've been worked half to death, all around the world, in all kinds of environments, and they still keep chugging along.

When I was building my makeup brush company, that was actually the main part of my mission statement - brushes that last and last and still deliver up the goods years down the line.

I'll get into discussing shapes of brushes, and how to build your personal brush collection over the next few weeks, but today I'll introduce you to my Powder Brush.

Its made from Badger Hair. The hair is packed just right, so that you can transport powder, and not just be flinging it around.
Some people use a powder brush to apply powder, I normally use it to sweep down the face after powdering, and again at the end of the makeup application to make sure that all excess is removed.
Its a beautiful looking brush, doesn't shed hairs everywhere, is nice and soft, so it doesn't irritate your skin, and being Badger Hair it picks up and moves product like no other!



Isn't it gorgeous?

You can check out my brushes at CorinnaB.com

If you're not buying my brushes, just make sure that quality is your main criteria with whichever brushes you are buying.

xo

C

Brush Me Baby!

So I wanted to answer some of the questions you've been sending me about the CorinnaB brush line, and rather than do endless replies, I figured I'd just put it all here.

I decided back in the mid nineties that I wanted to do a makeup brush line. I also decided that anything I would put my name on had to be of extraordinary quality, so I set in motion a program that took years to complete.

I would get a given set of brushes, and then put it through its paces for months on end, both with my personal at-home use, and also being integrated into my kit. I kept finding that most brushes were OK for a couple of months, but past that point they would start breaking down, losing too many hairs, losing shape and texture, and ultimately they would wind up in the "no way Jose" pile.

Then there would be the brushes that held up OK in terms of not falling apart, but didn't pick up and transport product efficiently. I wanted something that would really smoothly glide product across the skin.
I was able to eliminate different hairs - I didn't want squirrel, I didn't want pony etc, but it took a great deal of time to find something that I really did want.
I eventually came across badger brushes. The hair met the quality standards I had set, and my little love affair began...

But finding the right hair for your brushes is just the very beginning. Next up you have to decide on the specific shapes you want for your brushes, based on what tasks you want them to perform. After that the density of the hair comes into play. A brush that is too densely packed will create a stripe across this skin, a brush that doesn't have sufficient hairs bound into the ferrule will splay out across the skin and leave you with no control of the product placement.



With badger hair there are four shavings per year, and each shaving yields a different type of hair. The mid-winter shave is the softest hair, the summer shave is the most course hair.
After I had fallen in and out of that equation a few times, I got the perfect brushes.

So long story short, it took forever and a day to get it exactly as I wanted it, then 12 months of really working the brushes hard, and seeing how they held up before I was ready to put my name on them and introduce them to the world.

They've been around for a couple of years now, and I am still using my original sets everyday.
Oh, and by the way, these brushes are manufactured right here in America!

You can read about the individual brushes on the website CorinnaB.com

I'll periodically talk about an individual brush here on the blog, and I show you the brushes at work in the youtube videos.

I hope this answers the bulk of your questions, but always feel free to ask me more!



Have a gorgeous day

xo

C