Dual-ended brow brush

A dual-ended brow brush puts the two tools a brow needs on one handle. At one end is a small, stiff brush cut on a slant, for drawing hair-like strokes and pressing powder or pomade between the hairs; at the other is a spoolie, a spiral of short bristles like a clean mascara wand, for brushing the hairs into place before the colour goes on and blurring it afterwards. Turning the handle over is quicker than putting one brush down and finding the other, which is why this is the brush that pomades and brow kits so often come with.

It is one of several ways to pair the two. A single-ended angled brush and a separate spoolie do the same work, each on a full handle, and both have pages of their own. Brow pencils often carry a spoolie at the far end, where it belongs to the pencil. Some double-ended brow tools pair a brush with a comb, or a spoolie with a spatula for brow wax; those are other tools. The dual-ended brow brush is the angled brush and the spoolie.

Judge the angled end first, because it does the harder work. For pomade, look for a firm, densely packed head with a thin, sharp edge, such as Anastasia Beverly Hills’ Brush 14, which the house makes of firm natural fibres for stamping pomade into the brow; for powder, a softer head lays colour down more gently, as the same house intends its synthetic Brush 7B to. Synthetic fibre is the usual choice and the easiest to clean, since natural hair is porous and soaks up creams;^[1] a hair head is best kept for powder. Check the width against your brows, too: a narrow head draws finer strokes, and Tweezerman sizes its brush for narrow brows.

Then the spoolie. It should be dense enough to hold the hairs where it leaves them but not so stiff that it scratches, and small enough to reach the short hairs at the front of the brow. Look at the handle as well. Because both ends are working ends, the brush is held in the middle, and a slim handle turns more easily between the fingers than a thick one. If it will travel, keep it in a case, or the spoolie will pick up whatever else is in the bag. And if a pomade or powder came with a dual-ended brush of its own, use that one first: if its angled end splays or its spoolie is too soft to lift the hairs, you will know which end to buy better.

Start with the spoolie: brush the brows up and out to see their shape and the gaps. Turn the brush over, load the angled end lightly with powder or pomade, and draw short strokes in the direction of growth, beginning at the arch and working to the tail; come back to the front of the brow last, with whatever is left on the brush, and keep those strokes sparse. Turn the brush over again and brush through the colour with the spoolie, lightly, to blur the strokes into the hairs. Two or three passes are enough; more will lift the colour you have just put down.

The two ends need different care. Wipe the angled end on a tissue between loads, so that pomade does not build up and thicken the strokes, and clean it properly after every use with pomade. The spoolie takes on colour as it blends, so wash it with the rest of the brush, or keep a second, clean spoolie for grooming bare brows during the day. Wash one end at a time, holding the brush by its middle and keeping water out of both ferrules, and dry it lying flat.

Colouring the brow and grooming it were long done with separate tools, sometimes sold in the same box. Kurlash sold its Lashpac of 1930 as a stick of mascara “to darken lashes and mark brows”, adding: “It has a clever little brush for grooming too!”^[2] The American beauty expert Rose Laird, whose cake mascara was on sale by 1933, recommended two brushes with it, one to apply it and the other to separate the lashes, and the same two-brush technique on the brows.^[3]

The double-ended case came from elsewhere in the kit. Dubarry’s Eye-Lip Pencil of 1928 held a crayon for the lips at one end and one for the eyebrows at the other, its covering coloured red at the lip end and black at the brow end so that the right one came to hand.^[4] In 1958 the Scovill Manufacturing Company made a mascara container with a grooved applicator at one end and a comb at the other, one to lay on the colour and one to spread the lashes, a trick some older cake mascaras had used before.^[5] Maybelline’s eye range of 1960 included a Brow and Lash Brush ’n Comb.^[6]

When a spoolie and an angled brush first shared a handle is not recorded in anything read for this article. Both halves had long been in the kit: the spiral brush from the mascara tube, the small, firm brush from the colour. Joined, they are Rose Laird’s two brushes on one stick, and the second still does the job she gave it, separating the hairs after the colour.