Thread: First Brush: Recommend a good Silvertip?

There is a huge difference in best to silvertip (in my oppinion), I find that best tends to be stiff and sometimes rather prickly, a good silvertip is soft yet firm and no spikes (spikes being stiff pointy hairs). If you have the opportunity to feel the brush in a store first then do that as some "silvertip" aren't all that great I remember buying one a year or two ago that was so prickly that I may as well have used my old badge hair brush (I promptly returned that brush with a complaint).

As for price I wouldnt say you need to spend $500 but if you want a quality silvertip for the most part I would suggest buying a brush from a reputable brand for around $90-$130, though I have only baught a few brushes so maybe someone with more experience in this field would be better at suggesting a brand/price range.

The problem about suggesting brushes is that no matter what other people say or recomend its all down to prefference, I think there are a few members who baught silvertips but found that they preffered a stiffer bristle so they switched back to super or best. Size is the same way, I personaly like a mid ranged brush, of around 24mm with a medium length, as it produces a good quantity of lather yet leaves room to manuver on my face, unlike the larger brushes where I find its like painting a model car's detail with a 4" brush, in other words just blob it on and hope it worked, and small brushes have lots of control but I find producing lather more time consuming. Its realy all down to what you want, sometimes you just have to try out a few before you find one you like.

Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by Kevin8888

As for price I wouldnt say you need to spend $500 but if you want a quality silvertip for the most part I would suggest buying a brush from a reputable brand for around $90-$130, though I have only baught a few brushes so maybe someone with more experience in this field would be better at suggesting a brand/price range.

+1 Kevin. You can get a very nice silvertip for as little as $75, or you can pay obscene prices. SRD has a good selection, http://tamwoodworks.runtrails.com/ will custom make a brush for you that is beautiful, and many, many other sources.

My recommendation is to decide what your budget can afford then look at our many wonderful vendors. You can also look in the classifieds. You will get tons of recommendations here, but it really boils down to personal taste and budget.

Silvertip is something I don't pay much attention to. Everybody wants to call their brush silvertip so that they can charge high prices yet there's a rather big difference between various brushes.
I have fairly limited experience but I'd take one of the vintage 'best badger' that I used to have to a lot of modern day silvertip. Or Simpson's duke 3 in best badger for example.
From the brushes I've tried I didn't care for vulfix, and i liked rooney, simpson and shavemac.
A 100 budget should get you a good brush.
A lot of knots come from the same places, if you are getting a non-major brand brush I'd talk to the vendor and find out more about the knots since there could be rather large differences in them. All the reputable vendors have plenty of experience with different brushes and would steer you right.
My brushes are 22-23mm knot - that's what I like and I'd take smaller rather than larger.

Eventually it's a matter of preference and you wont know yours until you try a few in the spectrum. If you don't mind a brush that somebody else has used (often just once or twice) you can check the classifieds for used ones. I personally don't have problem with this - at one time the hair belonged to an animal and had seen a lot more nasty things than a bit of soap and somebody else's face.