Reviews, Tools

As soon as I saw Becca’s The One Perfecting Brush on the Sephora website, I knew I had to check it out. I haven’t really seen any brushes in quite that shape before, and it’s not too often that you see a full white goat brush except from specialized brush manufacturers. With that it mind, it made its way into my Sephora order.

The brush comes in a thick cardboard box that’s similar to the packaging for other Becca products. Most other brushes I’ve gotten were only protected by cellophane sleeves and sometimes had the bristles bent out of shape on arrival, so I appreciated it having an extra layer to keep it safe during shipping.

The brush has white goat hair bristles and a wide, flat handle. The handle has a soft-touch coating that’s similar to the texture of NARS blush compacts. It tends to show smudges and attract a little bit of lint, but it doesn’t feel like it will slip out of your hands. From the front, it looks just like the product photos. In reality, it was much bigger than I expected it to be. To put things in concrete terms, here are the measurements:

Width across the widest part of the bristles: 85mm

Bristle length: 25mm

Brush thickness: 30mm

Total length including the handle: 93mm

In other words:

Though keep in mind that I have a fairly small noggin and small facial features to go with it.

I had seen a few non-stock photos of the brush and I was still surprised at how thick it was. The stock photos look similar to the NARS Ita or Hakuhodo Itabake, but it’s not, not really. The brush is thick, dense and very soft. The bristles are densely bundled at the base and widen out toward the tips.

The hair looks and feels like uncut hair tips, but there are few hairs that look like they have blunt ends, which makes me think it’s made of sort of mid-quality hair. It’s not quite as soft as Hakuhodo white goat brushes, but it’s still very comfortable on the skin. The hair is evenly bundled throughout, with no sparse areas or clumps. Unfortunately, it did lose quite a lot of hair the first time I used it – about 10-15 hairs. That’s not really a ton, considering the total amount of hair that’s in there, but it’s definitely more than average. It was also a lot more shedding than I expected or wanted to deal with at the time since I was getting ready for work (and running late, as usual). Since then it’s lost a hair or two here and there, but nothing crazy.

This brush is advertised as a “bouquet of brushes in one” – a brush that can take the place of most or all of your face brushes. It comes with an insert that contains suggestions on how to use it for different products, which you can also find in the Related Links section on the Sephora page. Did it live up to the expectations?

Foundation – The brush has a good bristle length and density for foundation, but I find it a little bit awkward to use since the width doesn’t conform to the contours of my face. It also soaked up a lot more product than the other white goat brushes I’ve tried for foundation – probably because it’s four times the size of any of those brushes.

Contouring – The insert recommends using the flat top for contouring, which doesn’t work for me at all. The brush is much too thick and too long for all that. I can get by with it if I use the corner of the long side, but it’s still too long to be comfortable to use. It picks up and deposits the product easily, and blends it out well.

Highlight – Again, the flat top of the brush is recommended for highlighting. And once again, I call shenanigans, at least for my face. The brush is far too thick and long. It would be really easy to pick up too much product and overapply since the brush is so dense, but it could work as long as you’re careful about using a light touch.

Blush – Becca recommends using the ends of the brush to apply and blend blush, and it does work beautifully for that. The perfect amount of blush is applied and it blends effortlessly in circular motions. However, I still find a smaller round brush much easier to hold and maneuver.

Aside from that, I don’t like using the same brush for liquid and powder products at the same time since they get gunked up. The same goes for using the same brush for multiple powder products – it tends to muddy up the colors. As long as you use different sections of the brush for different colors it should be ok, though.

The size also presents a couple other issues. For one, it’s too large for me to hold comfortably across the width, making it hard to use from certain angles. The brush also won’t fit in the pan of any makeup products that I own, so it drags across the edges of the compacts – messy. Considering the size though, it washes easily and dries fairly quickly, and also keeps its shape very well.

In Short: This is a very nice brush and I want to love it, but the sheer size makes it unusable for me. If it were 2/3 the width and 1/2 the thickness I think I’d like it a lot. If the size of the brush matches up with the size of your face, it can probably deliver on its promises.

The Becca The One Perfecting Brush ($49) is available at sephora.com