Q: What’s the difference between professional cosmetic brushes and cheap makeup brushes?
A: Professional makeup brushes contain more hairs, are denser and softer than their cheap conterparts. They enable a makeup artist to apply perfectly placed colour very quickly. They require less product so you save money, on buying product more often.
Good brushes will retain their shape and won’t feel scratchy on the skin, using scratchy cheap brushes actually stretches the pores on your skin, cheap brushes will often get scratchy after a few months.
Top line makeup brushes will have bristles that are thin, soft, and uniform, laying neatly together and cut at an angle. Brushes with bristles that are coarse and fan outward like a broom are better reserved for children’s paint sets than professional makeup palettes.
Cheap brushes will shed a lot of hairs, professional brushes may shed a little but it should be few hairs and far between.
Buying poor quality brushes may seem to be the cheaper option but often it isn’t. For example, a relatively inexpensive cosmetic kit featuring dozens of different makeup brushes may be less useful and more costly than a few select brushes that are of high quality. In fact, an adequate professional makeup brush kit could consist of as little as five essential brushes and be cheaper than a 20 piece low quality brush set.
Q: What are Natural brushes made of?
A: Most brushes labeled “Natural” are made of different types of animal hair like Sable, Pony, Goat and even Badger and Squirrel.
Q: Which brushes are best?
A: The answer is not nearly as simple as the question, since there are many factors that must be considered.
The type of bristles you need depends on the medium you are working with. Natural bristles work best with powder products and synthetic bristles with oil based products. Powder works well for camera work, as it doesnt melt or shine. Therefore, most of the brushes in a media make-up artist’s kit should be made with natural bristles. But with hundreds of brushes to choose from how do you know which are best?
Most of the brushes should be dense, with a silky texture and a tapered, rounded shape.
