StylPro - The Story

Tom’s interest in makeup brushes and their cleanliness was first sparked by a make up artist. He says, “I had been running a programme called Tom’s Testers for a while, where I tell hand-picked beauty super-users about my latest inventions months before we launch. At the end of a session in Manchester, I asked if there was anything I could invent that would make their lives easier. One immediately said: “Please, please can you create something that makes it fast and easy to clean makeup brushes?” I quickly discovered that washing makeup brushes is a messy and fiddly task that everyone loathes doing – and that makeup professionals can have hundreds of brushes in their kit bags! Even worse is that some consumers don’t wash their brushes at all, meaning that they’re literally painting their faces with bacteria every single day."

That set me on a mission to develop the fastest and most efficient makeup brush cleaner. We carried out some focus groups and one-to-one sessions with both professionals and consumers. The more people we spoke to, the clearer it became that while cleaning the brushes is a problem, the biggest issue is drying them. A lot of people were put off washing their brushes because they think they’ll still be wet when they want to use them again 24 hours later. I knew I had to invent something that not only cleaned brushes thoroughly, but dried them at lightening speed too.

Testing

As part of our testing we created a machine which could repeat test the action of cleaning a brush and spinning dry 500 times.

We then took photos of the brushes to see if the brush changed at all. Synthetic brushes were unaffected by the spin. However natural brushes, especially soft hair like goat or blue squirrel, did slightly splay out when spun dry repeatedly 500 times. We therefore recommend you only spin dry natural bristle brushes for very short periods (2-3 seconds) then check. It is recommended for soft natural brushes to be left slightly damp and left to air dry for a short period. If any bristles do splay, use a damp cloth to reshape the bristles and leave the brush to air dry for a few minutes. The dampness should make the bristles come back into shape.

The spinning action which opens up the brush bristles exerts far less force than the squeezing and pulling action used why drying a brush between your fingers.