Why You Need to Take Care of Your Makeup Brushes
Is your vanity covered in stained pink sponges and brushes? Makeup tools get dirty quickly, and most people don’t think to wash them often enough. Taking care of your brushes is necessary. It doesn’t just impact the way you apply your makeup – it can also affect your health and wallet. Are you spending enough time maintaining your beauty tools?
Bacteria Leads to Breakouts
Your makeup brushes touch various parts of your face, return to your products, then repeat the process. This gets the job done, but spreads bacteria everywhere. Bacteria will continue to grow within your brushes, especially with trapped moisture from your foundation, cream products, primer, and humidity in the air. They quickly become fertile breeding grounds for all kinds of unpleasant organisms.
When you use dirty brushes, you contaminate your makeup and introduce stronger, fortified bacteria to your face. This ruins your makeup and your skin at the same time. If you’re acne-prone, you may be provoking breakouts with product contamination and dirty brushes.
Keep a few duplicates of the brushes you use most. As soon as you’re done using a brush, wash it, and lay it flat to dry. If you can’t wash it immediately, set it aside with the rest of your dirty brushes. Keep the fresh ones separate and wash a bunch of them at once to make things easy.
Dirty Brushes Won’t Apply Makeup Correctly
Even the best eyeshadow palettes in the world won’t look beautiful when applied with dirty brushes. When brushes aren’t washed frequently enough, they begin to accumulate pigment from your various products. Before long, you’ll have remnants of ten different colors built up in the fibers of each brush.
These colors will continue to translate to your eye as you use unclean brushes. The blend of residual pigments will muddy up the colors, causing beautiful eyeshadows to look dirty and ruddy when applied. This pigment also fills the brush, making it harder to apply and blend color.
Eyeshadow pigments require space within the brush bristles to move around and blend, and the brush will catch any fallout from the pigments that may otherwise land on your cheeks.
When a brush is loaded with old powder, it can’t do its job properly. It’s too densely packed and dusty to fulfill its purpose. At that point, you may be better off applying and blending eyeshadow with your fingers.
If you switch colors often and tend to favor the same few brushes, there are special sponges you can use to dust your brush between shades. These sponges allow you to switch colors without muddying up or mixing pigments within the fibers of the brush. These sponges are a convenient quick fix, but they aren’t a full-on replacement for washing those brushes.
Good Brushes Are Expensive to Replace
Brushes that haven’t been properly maintained over time are as good as ruined. Leaving pigments to sit for weeks or months on end can permanently stain the brush. An excess of power or cream products accumulated within the brush will eventually migrate toward the ferrule, the little metal part of the brush that connects the fibers to the handle.
When the product becomes trapped in the ferrule, it starts to break down the adhesive and causes excessive shedding of brush fibers, ruining the brush.
Conclusion
If you don’t take care of your brushes, you’re going to have to replace them frequently, costing you money and headache. If brushes are well maintained, they can last for years. Caring for your brushes is protecting your investment. These are your tools of the trade for looking and feeling great, so take maintenance more seriously and get better results.
David van der Ende is a full-time blogger and part-time graphic design enthusiast. He loves to write about a broad range of topics, but his professional background in both legal and finance drives him to write on these two subjects most frequently.