Powder brush

A powder brush is the largest brush most people own: a loose, fluffy dome of hair or synthetic fibre, four or five centimetres across, on a long handle. The looseness is the point. Each sweep picks up a little powder and lets it go in a fine, even veil, so the brush sets foundation or takes down shine without adding much coverage, and it is hard to overdo. The long handle helps: held near its end, the brush can only brush.

It is not the only way to lay powder down, and the difference matters. A puff presses powder into the skin and leaves more of it, which is why it is used for setting under the eyes. A kabuki is short and dense and buffs powder in for coverage. A blush brush is smaller, sized to the apple of the cheek. The powder brush is the one for the whole face, when the aim is to look powdered as little as possible.

Powder brushes are still made in both hair and synthetic fibre, and the two behave differently. Natural hair has a cuticle, a scaled surface that, as one brush patent puts it, helps lift powder and blend it across the skin; goat hair is the commonest natural hair in cosmetic brushes and the least costly.^[1] Its tips are blunt, which suits soft, rounded heads better than points.^[2] Squirrel hair is softer, more absorbent and holds a good point.^[3] Hakuhodo, the Japanese maker in the carousel, sells powder brushes of goat, of squirrel and of the two mixed.

Synthetic fibres, most often polyesters such as PBT, or nylon, are made to an exact thickness and can be made without pores, so they soak up little.^[1] That matters most with liquids, but it also makes a synthetic powder brush simple to wash. For powder, density matters more than fibre. A loose, airy head deposits least and suits setting a finished face; a fuller, denser one carries more and suits pressed powder, bronzer or a powder foundation. Match the head to your face, too: too big a brush dusts the hairline and jaw as well.

Tip a little loose powder into the lid, or swirl the brush once over a pressed compact, and tap the handle against your wrist so the excess falls away; most of what goes wrong with a powder brush is too much powder. Sweep lightly outward from the centre of the face, where shine usually starts, and let the weight of the brush do the work. For more hold on an oily forehead or nose, press and roll the brush there instead of sweeping. Finish with a few strokes of the clean, empty brush to lift away anything that has not settled.

Use a brush or a puff according to the job. Where make-up has to stay put, under the eyes, around the nose or on a shiny chin, press powder on with a puff or a damp sponge and dust the excess away with the brush; everywhere else the brush alone is enough. Loose powder gives the lightest veil; pressed powder carries more colour and suits touching up during the day.

Wash a powder brush every week or two, and more often if it has touched foundation. Work a mild shampoo through the head with lukewarm water, keeping the water below the ferrule, the metal collar in which the fibres are glued; rinse, squeeze, reshape and dry it lying flat or head down, so that water does not run back into the glue.

For most of the nineteenth century the tool for spreading powder and colour on the stage was not a brush but an animal’s foot. In The Road to the Stage (1827), which the V&A calls the earliest account of make-up in the English theatre, Leman Thomas Rede advised that “a rabbit’s foot is better than anything else for distributing the paint equally”, and in 1877 the authors of what the museum calls the first comprehensive manual of stage make-up were credited as “Haresfoot and Rouge”.^[4] By 1882, once greasepaint had arrived, a writer could already call it the old method: a coating of violet powder, with “the hare’s foot and rouge” called in to throw up the complexion.^[5] The V&A also keeps the hare’s paw from the dressing table of the theatre manager Sir Henry Irving, still marked with powder and rouge, taken as a souvenir by his valet after Irving died in 1905.^[6]

At the dressing table, powder went on with a puff. A British beauty manual of 1936 recommended swansdown for fine skin and lambswool for greasy skin, and brought in a soft brush only at the end, to remove the surplus.^[7] The film studios used brushes more freely: Elizabeth Arden’s screen make-up of 1935 was powdered with cotton and then “carefully blended with a specially prepared camel’s hair brush”.^[8] The name was a trade habit, not a description. Brushes sold as camel hair were made from the tail hair of squirrels, true camel hair being rare.^[9]

The museum’s record of its hare’s foot ends plainly: “Today the hare or rabbit’s foot has been replaced by brushes.”^[4] What the powder brush kept from it is the looseness, a soft, splayed head that spreads a little powder a long way.