Saturday, April 27, 2013

Tutorial: How To Clean Your Makeup Brushes

Hi there everybody!

As you may know, I just finished my dance concerts last week. And at those concerts was a whole lot of stage makeup. Unfortunately, many of my friends lacked the appropriate makeup brushes and I was feeling nice, so before I knew it my brushes had been smothered across the faces of every sweaty dancer in the school. When I got home, the first thing I wanted to do was clean my brushes, but I don't have a cleansing spray, plus I think this required a little more than that. Plus, people are supposed to wash makeup brushes anywhere from once every three weeks to once a year, depending on how often you use the brushes, so I knew that I was long overdue.

Below I have a tutorial of sorts, of how I cleaned my [filthy] brushes. It works quite well, and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs their brushes cleaned. 


You will need:
  • shampoo
  • toilet paper
    • paper towels or tissues work too
  • paper cups
  • petroleum jelly
    • makeup remover wipes can be used for this step
  • dirty makeup brushes

Step 1: Brushing off Excess Powder/Liquid

Take your brushes and brush off all excess powder or  on a dry piece of toilet paper. You want to get as much as possible off to make the upcoming steps easier, but you don’t need to thoroughly take off every little piece of powder or drop of liquid. You may also want to use more than one piece of toilet paper depending on the number of brushes you are cleaning.

Next, take two pieces of toilet paper (or one piece of toilet paper and one makeup remover wipe) and put petroleum jelly on one side, and leave the other side dry.

Lightly brush the tips of your brush in the petroleum jelly (or makeup remover wipe) and work the jelly through the tips of the brush. Don’t put on too much jelly however, as this will leave a heavy and sticky coating on your bristles. Also don’t work it too far down into the brush because it won’t wash out as will and again leave your brush heavy and sticky. Repeat this process on all of the brushes, and use more toilet paper, if necessary. Also do not be afraid to add more petroleum jelly to the toilet paper, as you will almost definitely need it.

Step 2: Shampoo

Now is the time to break out your shampoo! Start out with a warm water rinse, then start to lather on the shampoo.

Unlike with the petroleum jelly, you really want to work this into the whole brush to get everything all out. Work it in under running warm water, and reapply as necessary. After a little while of this, turn off the water and begin flicking and squeezing and brushing, getting all of that color out of the brush into the sing. Repeat this until all of the color is out on all of the brushes.


Step 3: Soak and Rinse

Get your cup(s) and fill them with enough warm water to submerge the brush, but not the handle (as to not melt the glue). For different sized brushes, use different cups with different levels of water. Let your
brushes soak in this water from 15 minutes to an hour. If you see the water get exceptionally cloudy, feel free to replace it.

After the soak, do another warm water rinse with a dabble of shampoo, if needed. Make sure all of the color and soap is out of the brush!

Step 4: Dry

Lay your brushes out on a piece of toilet paper once they are done with all of the steps. Leave them out overnight or for at least 12 hours. If you need immediate use of your brushes, towel dry as much as possible and then do a very light blow dry from at least one foot away on low.




So that's my little tutorial. Don't forget to follow me on Lookbook, Bloglovin, Blogger and Polyvore! I follow back, but if you follow on Blogger or Bloglovin please comment your URL so I can more easily follow back.

Stay cool!
-Audrey
aka The Sarcastic Asian

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