Cleaning your Makeup Brushes

Makeup brushes can be expensive. Even if they aren’t that expensive, you still want to keep them in great shape. I don’t think that price always indicates quality of the brushes, however. Either way, cleaning your makeup brushes is essential for good makeup application and to avoid bacteria.

Cleaning

You can clean your makeup brushes with a number of items and I have tried quite a few of them.

These products are the ones, I have really liked for doing a great job on cleaning and being economical.

I use Zote soap and Baby Hair + Body Wash (Baby shampoo), well, actually my daughter cleans them the most. These products have turned out to be the most effective at cleaning the makeup brushes.

They removes the makeup, dirt and oils but still haven’t make the hairs brittle.

You can pick up either item at most stores and the white Zote Soap is very economical, which is great especially when you have a lot to clean. Also it has coconut oil in it which has some anti bacterial properties.

Drying

It is important that you try and get out as much water as possible. Water that flows down the handle of the makeup brush can loosen up glue that holds all of the hairs/bristles. This ruins the brushes faster. You want to keep them in the best shape for as long as you can.

I make this drying rack thing with parachute cord, so that I can hang the brushes upside down to dry. When you have so many brushes with bigger handles those other drying devices didn’t work for me.

Small brushes that don’t take as long to dry so are just laid out on a towel to dry. These smaller brushes seem to stay in shape better than the larger brushes.

Shape

The Brush Guard is now available at Ulta so I decided to purchase a variety pack for $12.95. I do like these for keeping the brushes hairs from flaring out. They also seem to be fairly good quality.

They fit nicely on the brushes, but I need more larger ones because most of my brushes have larger handles. So in this case, I am not sure about the price tag on these guards. I may purchase some off of Amazon for a comparison.

The small ones fit great on the smaller eye shadow brushes. Most of these stay in pretty good shape as I have said before so I won’t use as many of these smaller brush guards.

Cleaning your makeup brushes and tools is so important for your skin as well. Bacterial can build up when your tools aren’t properly cleaned, which can lead to acne, bumps or reactions on your skin. I also use a DIY bacterial spray, that I will describe in a future post, to discourage bacterial growth on makeup products, brushes and makeup tools.