Brushes: Quick Guide and Essentials

Good brushes make a huge difference in the way your makeup looks. When the look is all about the eyes, eyeshadow brushes make your eyes look defined, the eyeshadow looks evenly applied and blended well with other shades. On your face, the use of powder, foundation and blusher brushes give you a polished and flawless look!

They can be a lifetime investment, if you take good care of them, but they can also be quite expensive, and starting up a brush collection can be very complicated. I decided to write this post, to help you girls, who are in the process of building up your makeup brushes collection and want to know what’s essential and what’s the best value for money you can get.

MAC and Sigma makeup brushes are, for me, the best in the market, and compared to MAC, Sigma is a lot cheaper with basically the same quality, but you can also find other brushes that are great affordable alternatives to both MAC and Sigma.

This is not a full guide and it only reflects my own opinion regarding these brushes. I will not list lip brushes because I don’t use them, so I wouldn’t be able to give you my opinion on them.

FACE BRUSHES

1. Powder / Blush brush

This will normally be a round-shaped very soft brush that you can use to apply face powder or blush.

• MAC 129 – £26 / $34 / R$172
• Sigma F10 – $16
• No. 7 Powder Blush brush – £17.50

2 – Buffer brush

This brush is super soft and perfect for applying bronzer or blending powder into your skin.

I bought the pink one in Primark, and I think it does the job pretty well, considering I paid £1.50 for it, and it’s pink! :)

• MAC 182 – £32.50 / $47 / R$219
• Sigma F45 – $19
• Primark Kabuki brush (pink) – £1.50 (sorry, can’t find a link!)

3 – Small Duo Fibre brush (Foundation)

This brush is great for blending your liquid foundation into your skin, leaving it perfectly even, but you can also use it for blending your face powder.

• Sigma F55 – $14
• MAC 188 – £26 / $34 / R$172

4 – Concealer brush

It’s a flat brush with a pointed tip to give you more precision in the application of you concealer. I personally don’t use this brush; for concealer I prefer to use my blending brush, which I’ll talk about bellow.

• MAC 195 £16 / $22.50 / R$99
• Sigma F75 $9

EYE BRUSHES

1 – Eye Shadow brush

This is a soft brush with round edges that can be used to apply or blend eye shadow. The fibers are very firm, but smooth at the same time. Sigma E55 is the smallest, but my favourite one for applying eye shadow is MAC 239 brush, and  No.7 Eye Colour brush is also great for blending!

• MAC 239 – £18 / $24.50 / R$117
• Sigma E55 – $9
• No. 7 Eye Colour brush – £6.64
• Urban Decay Good Karma Shadow Brush – £14.50 / $26

2 – Small Angle brush (liquid eyeliner)

This brush can be used to shape eyebrows and line your eyes. The flat surface with an angle makes it a lot easier to reach the corner of your eyes without making a mess. I use the MAC one all the time with my MAC Fluidline Blacktrack in my waterline and lash line.

• MAC 263 – £15 / $20 / R$92 (MAC 266 is very similar, just thicker)
• Sigma E65 – $9

3 – Blending brush

This brush has an oval shape and it is very soft and fluffy. I use it to blend eyeshadows in the crease and inner corner of my eyes, and also to apply concealer, as it blends it really well in my skin.

• MAC 217 – £15 / $22.50 / R$99
• Sigma E25 – $9

I think that’s about it, girls. I hope this helped some of you because if I had found something like this before buying my brushes, it would definitely have helped me!

As you can see, MAC brushes are amazing, but quite expensive, and Sigma brushes are very good quality brushes for more than half the price, so if you’re on a budget (or even if you’re not) definitely go for Sigma brushes. You won’t regret!

If you have any comments or questions regarding these brushes, please leave a comment bellow.

If you want to buy Sigma brushes, click here.