Tapered highlighter brush

A tapered highlighter brush is a small, soft face brush whose head narrows to a point, like a fingertip drawn out long. It is made for the smallest and most exact job in the cheek kit: putting light on the high points of the face, the top of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, the brow bone and the cupid’s bow, and keeping it off everything else. The point places the highlight in a narrow line; the soft sides around it blur that line into the skin, so the result reads as light falling on the face rather than as a stripe of shimmer.

Its neighbours do the same job differently. A fan brush lays a wider, sheerer band of highlight and is gentler still; a domed or rounded highlighter brush spreads the light over a larger area; a finger presses more product into the skin and gives the most intense result. A tapered sculpting brush has the same shape made larger, for contour. Choose the tapered highlighter for a precise, controlled line of light that can be built up or kept faint.

Look at the size of the point first. A small, firm tip, such as those on NARS’s #15 or Sigma’s F35, draws the narrowest line and reaches the inner corner of the eye and the cupid’s bow. A longer, fluffier taper, such as Ulta’s 124 or Bdellium’s 941, applies and diffuses in one movement and suits anyone who wants a soft glow rather than a visible line. Density sets the strength: a loose head leaves a sheer veil, a denser one, like EcoTools’ Luxe brush, carries more product and gives a brighter highlight.

Then the fibre. For powder highlighter, hair and synthetic both work; Hakuhodo makes its tapered highlighter in squirrel and goat hair and sells it for powder only. For cream and liquid highlighter, choose synthetic fibre, which does not soak up the formula and washes clean. Keep a highlighter brush for highlighter only: a brush that has carried bronzer or contour greys a highlight, and one that has carried shimmer leaves glints where they are not wanted.

Touch the tip to the pan and tap off the excess. Draw a narrow line along the top of the cheekbone, starting in line with the outer edge of the iris and running up towards the temple, then diffuse it with short back-and-forth strokes of the side of the brush. Keep the light above the blush and above the contour, never on the apple of the cheek, where it shows every pore. Add a thin line down the bridge of the nose, a dot on the cupid’s bow, and a touch under the arch of the brow; press rather than sweep where you want more intensity.

Build slowly and look in daylight: highlight that seems subtle under a bathroom light can read as a stripe outdoors. With cream or liquid highlighter, dab the colour on with the tip and blend its edge with the side before it sets. On oily skin, keep the light to the cheekbone and the brow bone and away from the nose and forehead, which will shine on their own by the afternoon. A touch pressed into the inner corner of the eye with the very tip brightens the eye; keep it off the lower lid, where shimmer settles into fine lines.

Wash the brush weekly, and reshape the point with your fingers while it is damp; a splayed tip spreads highlight more widely than you mean it to.

“A high light is a line of light playing along a bone, vein or muscle,” Helena Chalmers told actors in The Art of Make-up, first published in 1925 and revised in 1930. The cheekbone, she wrote, “catches a tiny line of high light along its upper edge in order to suggest light falling from above”, the edges softly blended with the fingers. Along a wrinkle the light was drawn “with a brush”, “very fine, then soften with the finger”, and the brush in her make-up box was “a No. 1 or No. 2 camel’s hair brush, which should be procured at an art material store”.^[1] On the stage, the brush for highlights was a small painter’s brush, bought where painters bought theirs.

The tapered highlighter brush is that brush made fuller and softer, so that it draws the line and softens its edge in the same stroke. Hakuhodo, the brush maker of Kumano in Japan, makes one tapered shape, whose “pointed tip is carefully designed to offer easy highlighting and good control”, in goat hair, goat and horse, blue squirrel, blue squirrel and horse, and the blue squirrel and goat of the brush in the carousel: one point, made five ways.^[2]

Highlighter became a large category of its own only recently. The market-research firm NPD reported that makeup’s growth in American prestige stores in 2017 came partly from “other face products such as bronzers, highlighters, and glow products”.^[3] Nearly every brush here is named for the product it carries, but the job it does is the one Chalmers described: a line of light along the top of the bone.