Fan brush

A fan brush is a thin, flat, semicircular spread of soft bristles gathered into a flattened ferrule. It is the lightest touch in the kit. Because the bristles lie in a single thin layer, they hold very little product and let it go easily, so a fan lays down a sheer band of highlighter along the cheekbone, or a veil of powder, rather than a patch. The same lightness makes it the tool for tidying up: swept over the face, a clean fan lifts loose powder from under the eyes and the fallout that eyeshadow leaves on the cheek.

It is not a powder brush, which is a full, round dome, nor a tapered highlighter brush, which comes to a point and places highlight in a smaller, brighter spot. Fans vary more than they look. A long, thin, airy fan is for the sheerest glow and for clean-up; a short, dense one carries more product and gives a stronger highlight; and a few large, fluffy fans are made for bronzer, and are found on the bronzer brush page.

Decide what the fan is for. For a soft, barely there highlight and for clearing fallout, choose a thin, flexible fan with long bristles, such as MAC’s 184S or Crown’s C545. For a highlight you mean to be seen, choose a shorter, denser fan, such as Sigma’s F42, which picks up more product and lays it more precisely; Hourglass makes its No. 16 with dense stippling bristles for liquid highlighter. For under-eye clean-up, size matters: a large fan like Make-up Designory’s #510 covers the area in one pass without touching the lashes.

Synthetic fibre suits every formula and is the one to choose for cream and liquid highlighter. A fan of hair, like Hakuhodo’s goat fan, is for powder; its Japanese shape, flat and compact with the whole surface curved, picks up a measured amount and travels well. Check the edge before buying: a good fan has an even, rounded outline, and bristles that spring back into line rather than separating into clumps.

For highlighter, touch the flat of the fan lightly to the pan, or dab it once into a cream, and tap off the excess. Lay the edge along the top of the cheekbone, from about the outer corner of the eye towards the temple, and sweep it back and forth a few times; the fan lays a narrow, even band and softens its edges as it goes. Use the tip of the fan for the bridge of the nose and the cupid’s bow. Build a second pass rather than loading more product.

For clean-up, keep a clean fan apart from the one used for highlighter. After eyeshadow, sweep it lightly downward over the under-eye area and the cheek to lift away fallout, and after setting powder, flick it over the face to remove what has not settled. A thin fan also lays a sheer veil of shimmer over the collarbones.

Fans lose their shape more easily than round brushes. Wash one gently, pressing the bristles flat between finger and thumb rather than scrubbing, and dry it lying flat, fanned out, so it keeps its spread.

Most of what goes wrong with a fan comes from asking it to do too much. Loading it heavily defeats the point: a fan carries little by design, and a thick coat of highlighter on its tip lands as a stripe. Pressing it into the skin splays the bristles and deposits product in streaks, so sweep instead, with the handle held towards its end. Using one fan for everything spreads shimmer where it is not wanted; the brush that has carried highlighter will leave a trace of it under the eyes during clean-up. And a dense, short fan is the wrong tool for fallout, which needs the longest, loosest fan you have.

The fan brush is also a painter’s tool. The Getty’s art vocabulary files fan brushes among artists’ brushes and defines them as “soft, very flat brushes of fan shape, made in either sable or bristle and set in a metal ferrule, often used for blending and to produce wispy effects”.^[1]

A painter writing for students in 1898 described its job exactly. The fan brush, Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst wrote in The Painter in Oil, “is a useful brush, not to paint with, but to flick or drag across an outline or other part of a painting when it is getting too hard and liney. You may not want it once a month, but it is very useful when you do want it.”^[2]

That is still what a fan does on a face. It softens what another tool has put down: a highlight with too hard an edge, powder settled under the eyes, eyeshadow scattered on the cheek. Several of the brushes here are sold for exactly that, from Make-up Designory’s fan for lifting powder from under the eyes to wet n wild’s, which it calls a clean-up tool for fallout. The other job, laying a thin band of highlight, uses the same quality, a spread of bristles too sparse to deposit much. When the fan joined the make-up kit is not recorded in anything read for this article. What it brought with it is clear enough: a brush made not to add colour but to take the hardness out of it.