Monday, July 20, 2009

Beauty Binge: Synthetic newbies at CS

I am trying to move away from using natural-bristled brushes to synthetic ones. Just doing what I can to be cruelty-free in my daily life.


I was curious with the few new brushes on Coastalscents.com. Lately CS has been churning out a whole bunch of new stuff, and I was intrigued at the new Large Synthetic Buffer Brush. It looked like Everyday Minerals' Flat top brush, and I needed a suitable brush to buff on my minerals so that gave me enough reason to purchase this. Initially, this was tagged at about $5 with some change, but when I bought it, it was a whopping $13.95. For CS' standards, that's just exorbitant!! It certainly is one of the most expensive brushes on CS, but I grit my teeth and purchased it anyway.

Large Synthetic Buffer brush

It's a pretty big brush, a little heavy, so soft and very very dense. I used this to buff in my liquid foundation, and found a bunch of stray fibers on my face. So I thought it's just too dense to handle sticky liquids, so I tried this with my mineral foundation. Still, choc-full of fibers on my face! The amount of shedding was ridiculous!! I didn't notice that much shedding when I washed it, but I was pretty disgusted (and disappointed) with the quality. I can still pull out a bunch of strays from the brush, it's like the hairs were not bind well at all!! I do realise that shedding is expected with very dense brushes but this was a little excessive! The bristles are also too long to use for stippling and buffing. The brush lacked control and it just seemed to be bouncing off my face. This brush did not work well for me, and I was surprised at the many positive reviews this gets on the CS site. I think I am using this strictly for loose powder application. I was royally p!ssed to have spent this much on a poor-quality brush!!

The next synthetic purchase is the Synthetic Deluxe Crease brush for $2.95.


CS Synthetic Deluxe Crease

Soft brush, but the first thing I noticed was the length of the bristles. I thought it was too long to use in the crease.While I like the size of the brush - it fits nicely into my crease - I found it hard to blend colours with this brush. It's not stiff enough to carry the colours into the crease, and the length of the bristles made it a little hard to control when blending. I even found it hard smoke the colour out, as I personally feel this brush did not pick up much colour. It's too narrow to use as a blending brush, but perhaps it can be used for precised application, not so much for blending colours in the crease. Yet, another disappointment.



I've placed another order for their Synthetic Shadow brush. Let's see how that will work. *cross fingers and toes*

Thanks for droppin' by!


xoxo,
puss.inheels@yahoo.com

5 comments:

Connie De Alwis said...

ooh... sorry that the brushes disappointed! They looked so promising! what a shape. More power to elf Studio eh? amazing quality and CHEAP!

puss.in.heels said...

Connie: yeah, i'm even more convinced that the ELF Studio Powder Brush reigns supreme!!

plue said...

You know, I ordered that synthetic crease brush n it came deformed!!!

the hair was slightly snip off by scissors or something, which is so obvious! T_T

but i like it for being soft tho. sigh, i guess nothing beats the IB crease brush i guess.

puss.in.heels said...

Plue: Ayoh! That's awful to wait and end up receiving something deformed! The crease brush is soft but I found it hard to blend the colours with. I like the IB crease too, but I've been using the essence of beauty crease brushes more tho.

plue said...

Yala! Angry lor! IB does the job well, but it's a little big for me, the size of the synthetic is better, but sigh, i was hoping it wud perform as well as IB :(