Spoolie

A spoolie is a mascara wand with nothing on it: short bristles held in a spiral by a core of twisted wire, on a handle. Because the bristles stand out all the way round, it catches hairs from any angle, and because they are short and springy it moves the hairs without dragging on the skin. That makes it the brow’s everyday grooming tool. It brushes the hairs up before any colour goes on, so the gaps show; it softens pencil, powder or pomade into the hairs afterwards, so the strokes stop looking drawn; and it combs through wet mascara to part the lashes before they set.

It colours nothing itself, which is what separates it from its neighbours. An angled brow brush places colour; a brow comb, with a single row of teeth, parts the hairs but does not blend; the wand in a tube of mascara or tinted gel is a spoolie loaded with product. Many brow pencils carry one at the far end, and dual-ended brow brushes pair one with an angled head. A spoolie bought on its own is for a better one than the pencil came with, a clean one, or several.

Most spoolies are made of synthetic bristle, and they differ in density, stiffness and shape. A dense head with plenty of short bristles, like Tweezerman’s, grooms firmly and spreads a gel or soap evenly as it brushes; a sparser one parts lashes more cleanly. Firm bristles lift coarse brows, while soft ones are kinder to fine, sparse brows and to the skin beneath them. The spiral may be straight, tapered to reach the short hairs at the front of the brow, or cut on a slant, as ColourPop cuts its Brow Brush for use with the house’s brow wax. The handle matters as much as on any brush: a full-length handle, like MAC’s 204 or Smith Cosmetics’ 214 with its bent ferrule, gives the control of a paintbrush, while a short one travels.

Then decide whether to keep one or throw them away. A well-made spoolie washes like any other brush and lasts. Disposable wands come in packs and are made for a single use or a short life: Make-up Designory sells its twenty-five for “a sanitary mascara application”, and Real Techniques says its disposables are durable enough to use “as long as you want” before they go in the bin.

Before colour, brush the brows straight up, then out along the arch and tail, to see the gaps and where the brow naturally ends. After colour, brush through once or twice in the direction of growth with a clean spoolie and a light hand: the aim is to blur the edges of the strokes into the hairs, not to scrub the colour off. With a brow gel, soap or wax, the spoolie can also do the applying. Pick up a little, brush the hairs up, and press them flat with the side of the spiral.

On lashes, work while the mascara is still wet. Hold the spoolie level at the roots and wiggle it out to the tips to part any clumps, then leave the lashes alone to set. A spoolie that has been through mascara belongs to the lashes; wash it before it goes near the brows.

A spoolie works next to the eye, so keep it clean. Wash a reusable one weekly, and after any use with mascara, gel or wax: lather it with a mild soap or brush cleanser, work the suds between the turns of the spiral with a fingertip, rinse, and leave it to dry head down or lying flat. Replace it when the bristles splay or mat.

Keep it to yourself. The FDA advises against sharing or swapping eye cosmetics, “not even with your best friend”, and warns that the risk may be greater with testers in shops, where many people use the same product; anyone sampling there, it says, should use single-use applicators.^[1] That is the job of the disposable spoolie: one person, one wand. Salons have moved the same way, to single-use materials wherever possible, though disposing of them has become a problem of its own.^[2]

The spiral brush came into make-up inside the product. Its construction, as the historian James Bennett describes it, is bristles, typically of nylon, laid between bent wire that is then twisted round to make the brush.^[3] His most notable early example in make-up is National Cosmetics’ Modern Mascara of 1937: a hollow cylinder of cake mascara in a metal tube, into which a wet spiral brush was pushed and rolled to load it, and which its makers said covered the lashes “evenly all over instead of just on their bottom side”. Between uses the brush screwed into the case, which, Bennett notes, left it prone to growing microorganisms unless the formula carried an antimicrobial.^[4]

When mascara moved into tubes at the end of the 1950s, most makers switched within a few years to spiral wire brushes.^[3] They sold the change on the brush itself: Gala of London’s Galamatic Mascara of 1960 “has a spiral brush—and there’s nothing like a brush for treating each eyelash as an individual”.^[5]

When the empty wand was first sold by itself, to groom the brows, is not recorded in anything read for this article. MAC now describes its 204 as a spoolie made to simulate a mascara wand. And the risk Bennett saw in the Modern Mascara brush, a damp brush living in its own case, is the one the disposable wand is sold against.