Make-up Brushes – An Overview

Whatever touches your face warrants intense scrutiny. Just one brush that you use undergoes more than 80 processes to make sure they are delivered to you with stellar quality.

Below lies the entire brush making process explained to you in simple terms. We believe that every customer is entitled to know how their product is being manufactured. Every brush is a culmination of hours of effort, attention, and hard work, and the cost is absolutely worth the resources invested. Every brush that leaves our premises undergoes intense evaluation, processing, and testing to ensure nothing but the best reaches your homes.

Every make-up brush out in the stores, be it of low quality or high, cheap or expensive, is hand made. The degree of quality is solely dependent on the quality of raw material used and the amount of attention paid to every detail.Brush anatomy

Before beginning to outline the whole process, it’s important to know the anatomy of any given make up brush. A make-up brush is made of three parts: head, handle, and ferrule.

The head is the part that touches your head. Or rather, your face. The head is made up of the soft bristles, which get attached to the ferrule, the intermediate part of the brush. The top of the brushes that graces your face is called the toe, while that touching the ferrule base is called the tail.

The brush bristles can be either natural or synthetic. The fibers which are obtained from animalistic origins are called natural, while those manufactured otherwise are called synthetic. Both have their own pros and cons, which are discussed later in the article.

The ferrule is the part that keeps the bristles together on one end while extending to the handle on the other.

The handle is the last part of a brush and is made of varying lengths on the basis of their use. Handles are made of plastic, metal, and wood, although plastic handles are not preferred.

Different materials can be used to make any of these, thus offering variation, texture, comfort, and ease of use. Soft hair like goat hair make for lovely powder brushes, while badger hair is stiffer and make for easy to use brow and liner brushes.

Bristle types 

The bristles can be of two types.

Animal hair

These are often referred to as the natural bristles and are made from hairs of animals such as squirrels, goats, badgers, weasels, foxes, etc. The type of animal hair used depends on the degree of softness required and the amount of money you are ready to shell out.

The animal hair has been used to produce make-up brushes for decades and still continue to be widely used to do the same.

The animal hairs have the presence of a cuticle and are therefore not suitable for cream products as they pick up a large amount of product and clump easily. At the same time, the cuticle makes for an easy and evenly distributed coating of make-up.

Synthetic hair

Synthetic brushes are completely made out of manufactured fibers such as polyester and nylon and make for a more sustainable option when compared to animal hairs.

Devoid of a cuticle, these make great brushes to trap cream and gel and are thus very much suitable for the same. Moreover, they can be designed to mimic animal brushes and hence make for some very lovely powder and make-up brushes as well.

Synthetic brushes offer a lot of versatility and diversity in terms of design and choice and hence are a very suitable alternative to animal hair.

Additionally, since certain people might be allergic to certain animal hair, synthetic brushes save the day. They have the option of being dyed to any color, offering more choices in terms of aesthetics, although they are often dyed brown to imitate the color of animal hair.

The making 

As I previously mentioned, every brush is hand made. But also, every brush constituent is measured to the tiniest detail to produce identical and best quality products. It all starts with weight.

Weighing

First, the bristles are clumped together and are to weigh to a specific measurement. The weight of bristles in every brush is strictly regulated and hence needs to be maintained to retain quality.

Carding

Everything in life works well when it’s organized and tidy. Brushes are no exception. The bristles are in an unevenly mixed upstate after the weighing process. They are then neatly straightened out and laid out evenly through the carding process. A special comb is used to smoothen out the irregular bristles and filter out the unrequired particles that might have gotten stuck—no place for strays.

Molding

The bristles are then put into a mold and tapped lightly in a certain manner to give it shape. This is one of the trickiest parts of the complete brush making procedure. The bristles are first transferred into a molding cup. The transition isn’t always easy. Keep in mind that these hairs are extremely soft. It’s very easy for hairs to stray from their tidy places and go awry.

Thus the hairs are first transferred into the mold with the utmost care. After this, the brush makers intently work on giving the brushes the shape. When it comes to make-up brushes, the shape is the most important factor. How it’s shaped can largely affect the effectiveness of the make-up application.

While the shaping sounds simple, it takes years to achieve mastery, overdoing it right. Shaping every brush to look the same, i.e., perfect, is no small feat.

It’s not just casual tapping. The taps need to be regulated at different strengths at different intervals to achieve the exact shape.

The molds can be found to be made of wood, copper, or plastic. Each brush type has a corresponding molding cup to give it the required shape.

Tapping

Oh yes, the tap gets a segment of its own. That’s how important it is. Just like tap-dancing can’t be done with just one kind of tap, brush tapping needs to be done at various levels of force at different times to deliver the best results. This isn’t just a test of strength control but also of balance; with every tap, the direction of the bristles changes on its path to achieve perfection. With more and more taps, the level becomes visible, and it’s paramount that the bristles are properly shaped and leveled onto a flat base on the bottom.

Wrapping

Once the head has been shaped, the head is sewed up by a thin thread to avoid bristles from spreading. Once the sewing is complete, the tail is shaved to level it further to ensure proper spreading and infiltration of the glue. This is to make sure that the head remains firmly adhered to the ferrule because shedding bristles is a firm no in our production line.

Loading

Then comes loading. Unlike the annoying loading sign on a website or movie, loading here refers to the installation of the head onto the ferrule. The bristles are now transferred to the ferrule to get glued. The brush is almost made people!

Dismantling

Once the proper level has been achieved, the above set up is dismantled, and the thread is removed back again to restore the bristles to their previous round shape.

Pressing

Every ferrule is different, and some ferrules crave special attention. They need to be pressed into shape before any further action can be taken.

Gluing

The glues can be found of different viscosities. Choosing the right glue is the next important step. Glues can be of two types: domestic glue and imported glue. The domestic glue has a low concentration, reduced viscosity as well as a great odor.

The ratio of the thinner (when necessary) to the glue, the infiltration time of the glue, and the type of glue depending on the type of ferrule that is being attached to the brush.

If the brush later is accompanied by a smell, it’s the courtesy of the glue and thinner and not the paint job on the handle. The paint smell dissipates over a couple of months, but the smell of the glue doesn’t dissipate as easily.

Cleaning

Once the installation is done, the hairs are cleaned and sorted out from the top once again. The hair is combed gently from the tail to the toe and then flipped carefully while maintaining the shape and the softness of the brush. The same process is done once again after baking to remove short hairs, floating hairs, and broken hairs.

Baking

After the above processes, the brushes are put into PP bags for baking and shaping. Certain specialized brushes such as fire candle brushes and yellow wolf tail brushes are further shaped with water chestnut powder or rubber powder and then transferred to an oven to bake at high temperatures.

Some brushes may seem very hard when they’re brand new. That might be due to the water chestnut powder treatment. The powder can be washed off to restore the smoothness of the brushes.

Installing

Lastly, the handles are properly chosen accordingly and installed.

Inspecting

In the end, each brush is properly inspected, and the brushes with the slightest distortion or defect are sorted out.

Voila! The brushes are ready to be shipped.

While we have broadly classified the whole process into 12 steps, it’s a painstaking process involving a lot of attention to detail and too many hours to count to come up with the final product.

I hope this leaves you better informed than before about how much love and care your brush is given before it reaches your shelf!

But wait. We are not done yet.

Brush making is almost considered an art in itself. And one can definitely agree with the sentiment because it takes a wide range of talent coupled with immense patience to work day after day, making brushes for others to use.

Before we let you finish your reading for the day, why not understand a bit about the history of cosmetics, which billions of people in the world today use routinely.

The history

Make-up is used today as a method of beautification and as a medium of art. After all, painting faces is painting too. But that’s not where the journey of make-up began. Its life was born out of more humble origins.

The first use of make-up can be traced to Egypt, the place of pharaohs, pyramids, and camels. The valiant kings and queens wanted to match their looks to their potential caliber; they felt it made them look more God-like, but more importantly, make-up began to be used in a healthy perspective.

Kohl was used around the eyes to look beautiful as well as the ward of diseases and other germs due to the lead it contained.

Those of you who have been to Egypt and those of you who haven’t both know the dry climate there. Those who lived there felt it too. They used a variety of essences and substances to keep their skin moisturized, now known as perfumes and creams.

The Greeks were always fast to catch up on trends and started using make-up soon enough.

One more interesting way where the use of make-up increased is the fact that people began to mistake fair skin to be a status symbol and as a measure of beauty. The women of the noble classes usually stayed indoors and thus had a pale complexion showcasing their lack of activity out in the sun. The other women who worked hard to earn their living under the sun took fairness to equate to beauty and found ways to whiten their skin.

Thus the powders and foundation were born.

More amazing is the fact that make-up became a way of establishing authority too.

The later Egyptians had a habit of painting their nails in different colors, but certain colors were restricted from being used by the commoners. Over time, each level had its designated colors, and taking one look at their nails could tell you where they belonged in the socio-economic strata.

Make-up then and a while after was still being made personally for their own use or acquired through someone. Commercial and widespread make-up usage was still not witnessed. All of that changed when the French perfected the art of making perfumes and started producing perfumes that came to be demanded by people thousands of miles away.

Over time some cosmetic makers rose above the others, and there came to be an established market that grew and grew and spans millions of users worldwide today.

In minuscule

The use of cosmetics worldwide all started in the houses of Egyptian royals years ago. It started as a means of health benefitting substances, evolved to become a status symbol, and finally stands today as a tool for beautification and a medium of artistic expression.

It’s said that the artist is worth only as much as her tools. Thus while cosmetics are important, without the right tools to apply them, it would be of no consequence.

This set up the brush making industry into motion. With the increase in monopolized make-up makers selling make-up, the brush making industry too rose up significantly.

The brushes are made through a meticulous process involving every precaution and care to deliver the best brush possible to the users.

Made out of either animal or synthetic hair, the brush bristles are made soft and sturdy to help you apply your cosmetics with complete ease.

The hair for the bristles is gathered, sorted, and leveled out, and then distributed into chunks. The clumps are then weighed into even distributions and then smoothened out to remove broken hair and any of those floating around.

The hair is then leveled and put into a molding cup to give it a rounded shape and then sewed to avoid straying. The bristles are then glued to the ferrule on one end after choosing the right one through an extensive vetting process. The brushes are then baked, and the handles are then installed to match the pre-planned aesthetics designed for them. The brushes are then properly inspected before sent for shipping.

Makeup brushes and what they do？

Why us?

We at Sophienia believe that the brushes you use matter as much as the cosmetics you choose. We work hard and long to ensure that every brush that leaves our factory provides ultimate satisfaction to its users and makes them come around asking for more.

Though we are still a small production unit, we believe in quality over quantity and aim at taking the brush-making industry to a new level of authenticity and quality through our extended efforts.

We believe that our products will speak for us more than words ever can. We assure you that your decision to opt for our brushes would be a wise one in every respect.

Last but not least, we believe that the right intentions are the foundation of any successful goal in life, and we strive to maintain the same outlook throughout our work.