Flat concealer brush

A flat concealer brush is a flat foundation brush made small: a tongue of smooth, fairly firm synthetic fibre about eight millimetres wide, gathered in a pinched ferrule on a slim handle. Its job is placement. The flat face picks up a little concealer and presses it onto one spot; the thin edge reaches the inner corner of the eye, the crease beside the nostril and the line of a scar, where a fingertip is too broad and a sponge takes too much.

It is the precise half of a pair. A concealer buffing brush, small, dense and domed, blends concealer into the skin; the flat brush puts it down and leaves it there, which is why it suits thicker, fuller-coverage formulas and small, sharply defined marks better than a sheer wash under the eye. Some makers add a second head at the other end of the handle, a pin-point tip for the smallest marks.

Width comes first. A narrow brush, a few millimetres across, is for single spots, broken veins and the edge of the lip; a wider one covers a patch of redness or the shadow under the eye in a few presses. Hakuhodo sells its flat concealer brush in three sizes, and Laura Mercier’s Secret Camouflage Brush puts a fine tip for the smallest spots and a wider, flatter base for larger areas on one head.

Then the tip and the firmness. A rounded tip leaves a soft edge; a tapered or pointed one reaches into corners and draws a precise line; a straight edge, like Make-up Designory’s narrow brush, runs along the lower lash line. A firm, dense brush pushes a thick cream or a stick concealer into place and gives the most coverage; a softer, springier one lays liquid down more thinly. Choose synthetic fibre, which does not soak up concealer, so that what you pick up is what you put down.

Warm a little concealer on the back of your hand and pick it up on the tip of the brush, not the whole head. Press it onto the centre of the blemish, patting rather than sweeping, so that the product stays where it is put; a sweep moves it off the spot it was meant to cover. Leave the centre alone and soften only the edge, with the side of the brush, a clean fingertip or a buffing brush, until no line shows.

Work in thin layers: a second small press over a spot that still shows covers better than one thick one, which cracks and slides by the afternoon. Set it with a little powder pressed on with a puff or a small brush, not swept across. Under the eyes, use the flat brush to place concealer only in the darkest part, usually the inner corner, and blend outward with something softer.

The same brush has other uses. Painted across the lid with concealer up to the socket line, it carves the sharp edge of a cut crease; run along the outside of the lip line, or under the tail of a winged liner, it cleans up an edge that has gone astray.

On a raised spot, cover the spot itself and not the whole red area around it, and use a concealer that matches the skin rather than a lighter one, which catches the light and shows the bump. Trace broken veins with the tip, in short strokes along their length. A colour corrector, a green sold to counter redness or a peach sold for bluish shadows, goes on first, in the thinnest layer the brush will lay, and only where that colour is. Concealer is thick, and a flat brush packs it into the ferrule: wash the brush after every use and dry it flat, so that the tip keeps its edge.

Painting out a mark on the face is older than the brush made for it. In 1909 the actor Cavendish Morton, in a manual of stage make-up, put in wrinkles and shadows with a small wax-modelling tool, one end curved and brought to a knife-like edge, which he found “not only valuable for applying colours” but useful for shaping nose paste too. No brush appears in his list of make-up materials.^[1]

The camouflage make-up that Lydia O’Leary developed for serious blemishes did go on with a brush. Her Covermark began as a lotion, developed by 1928 and sold from 1931, and was applied with a brush until a cream that covered better replaced it; a British trade advertisement of 1937 told chemists to have it used “like paint”.^[2] Small brushes were meanwhile being carried for the lips. A patent filed in 1946 observed that many women preferred to put on lip rouge with a brush rather than a crayon, and that accessories for the handbag holding rouge and a brush had already been devised.^[3]

The flat concealer brush joins those two habits, the paint-like cover and the small brush carried for precise colour, and its own beginnings are thinly recorded: nothing read for this page names a first. One kit gives it a date. When the mineral-makeup company Bare Escentuals filed to go public in 2006, its introductory kit held two shades of foundation, an application brush, a full-coverage brush and a maximum coverage concealer brush,^[4] the flat brush bareMinerals still sells under that name.