Makeup brushes: The essentials

If you're looking to start out with some makeup brushes it can be a bit confusing, there are so many different shapes and sizes and brands and colours and hairs and fibres!

Here I'm going to share with you what I would consider to be the 'essentials' this is for the face and the eyes because it is true that your fingers, sponges, and sponge tip applicators that you get with some makeup is sufficient. Investing in some brushes is the next slightly more serious step in your makeup collection.

First of all, I will always recommend synthetic (man made) hairs over natural (animals such as ponys and goats) haired brushes, they are more durable, often cheaper and to be honest, kinder. My initial brush set came from BareMinerals which uses only natural hairs, the brushes are good but knowing what I know now, if given the choice I would purchase all synthetic

The brush breakdown:

1. A foundation brush. If you're a liquid user then a flat foundation brush will work a treat. Mine is from Boots No7 range and I used a money off voucher aswell. If you're more of a powder foundation girl then a kabuki brush is the way foward

2. An 'other' powder brush. It will often be called a face brush, or a bronzer brush. Its just flat and fluffy and is a universal tool to apply bronzer, blusher, highlighter and finishing powder.

3. A flat eye brush, this one is fluffy and broad enough to cover the whole eyelid in a shadow easily, but used on it's tip it can get into the crease aswell. It's a universal brush and you will always have a need for it. This is called the 'Contour shadow' brush by Bare Escentuals

4. Finally, the best til last and my favourite brush of all time, my 'desert island' brush is the MAC 224, although there are plenty of cheaper alternatives. This is the mother of blending brushes. It turns a smokey eye that looks like a black eye into a Beyonce makeup look. Where it's bristles swirl, the world is a better place. I use this brush every single day, and I've not found another I like more. It blends a lot, it blends a little, it tones down colours, brightens eyes, softens edges. Gah! I don't know what it's made of, but it must be filled with fairy dust.

The brushes really do the work for me, I don't consider myself to be especially talented over anyone without brushes at makeup, the brushes to me are kind of like cheating because they are so good, it is very hard to go wrong. They erase all mistakes and blend all flaws and I just swirl the handle in a logical way hoping for the best.