Angled blush brush

An angled blush brush is a blush brush with its top cut on a diagonal, like a chisel: one side longer than the other, the whole head about three centimetres across at its widest. The long side is laid along the cheekbone, and the slant turns a dab of colour into a line. Swept up and back, it carries blush from the cheek towards the temple, where a round brush would leave it on the apple.

It sits between two neighbours. The round blush brush is for the apple and a softer, rounder flush; the angled contour brush is denser and cut more sharply, for laying shadow into the hollow beneath the bone. The angled blush brush is fluffier than the one and more precise than the other, which is why many makers also sell it for bronzer.

Look at the angle first. A gentle slant, like Sigma’s F43 or Kosas’s, blends softly and suits an everyday flush; a steeper cut gives a crisper line and moves towards contour, and Hakuhodo’s angled blush brush is dense enough to shade as well as colour. Then the density. A fluffy head, like Morphe’s, diffuses powder; a denser one, like Anisa’s or Real Techniques’ Cat Paw, holds its shape against cream and liquid blush, which need pressing into the skin rather than dusting on.

Fibre follows the formula, as with any brush. Hakuhodo makes its slant of blue squirrel and horse hair, for powder; synthetic fibre is the choice for cream and liquid, which hair would soak up. And size the head to your cheekbone: one much wider than the bone spreads colour into the hollow and the temple at once, while a small one needs several passes.

Find the top of the cheekbone with your fingertips first. Tap off the loaded brush, lay its long side along the bone with the longer fibres towards the ear, and sweep up and back towards the temple in two or three short strokes, starting where the colour should be strongest, usually level with the middle of the eye. Then soften the edges in small circles, especially the lower one, so that no line shows.

Placement changes the effect. Colour set higher and further back lifts the face and reads as sculpted; lower and further forward, towards the apple, it reads as a flush. Draping carries it in a long curve up over the temple. For cream blush, press and pat with the flat of the slant rather than sweeping, and blend the top edge last. Let your own bone set the line rather than a chart: follow the cheekbone you have, and stop a finger’s width short of the hairline.

Most angled blush brushes are sold for bronzer as well, and the slant suits it: laid along the top of the cheekbone and swept up to the temple, then across the forehead where the sun would catch it, it gives warmth without the stripe of a contour. Keep one brush for each, or clean it between them, because a brush that has held bronzer muddies a pink. For highlighter, use only the longer tip, touched along the very top of the bone.

The commonest is taking the colour too low, into the hollow beneath the bone, where it looks like contour in the wrong colour; keep the long side on the bone, not under it. The next is a hard stripe, from too much colour in one stroke: tap more off, sweep lightly and build. Stopping short of the hairline leaves an edge, so blend the colour out towards it. And a slant shows its angle only if it keeps its shape, so wash the brush weekly, and at once after cream, and dry it lying flat with the cut edge free.

Where blush goes has changed more than what it is. In 1909 the actor Cavendish Morton told readers making up as Romeo to dust dry rouge on the cheeks after powdering and carry it up to the temples.^[1] In the 1930s the Hollywood make-up artists Perc and Ern Westmore developed what the historian James Bennett calls the first systematic approach to make-up and hair by face shape, built on the premise that the ideal face was oval. Perc set out seven face types in newspaper articles in 1937 and in a booklet of 1939 that came with a measuring wheel for working out one’s own, and after the Second World War Ern taught a simpler five.^[2]

Blush went the same way. After the war, stick rouges were generally marketed as blushers and used to sculpt the shape of the face rather than to make the cheeks look rosy, and Revlon’s Face Gleamer stick blusher of 1967 was, in Bennett’s words, more concerned with accentuating the cheekbones than with mimicking cheeks untouched by sun.^[3] Making up by face shape, he notes, is still in circulation.^[2]

The angled blush brush is the tool for that shift: a brush cut to follow the bone rather than to fill the apple. Its own beginnings are not recorded in anything read for this page. What survives in it is the old stage instruction, to carry the colour up towards the temple.