Thread: Badger hair brush losing bristles

My wife bought me an Omega Badger Hair brush in mid June. The brush came with a stand so it faces down while drying. When i got it i gave it a warm wash and let it air dry. After each shave i wash out the lather with warm or cold water. I shave and lather with cold water.

The brush is losing 2-5 bristles each time I shave. Is this normal? If not is there something that i could be doing to fix it?

To be honest, I don't know. I flick or shake the water out of mine before hanging upside down. I think a hair or two, here and there are normal. Sorry I can't help, but I am also curious about Brush Hair Loss, and look forward to finding some answers on this topic. Experts, please, if you would.

I've not noticed a great deal of hair loss from my brush over the years that I've had it, however I gave it it's first proper cleaning in a 1:10 vinegar/water solution yesterday and had it shed about 3 hairs on me in this mornings shave.
Some is normal, but I think yours might be chucking too many out. I'm no expert though. How to fix it would be beyond me.


Mick

I don't know if I qualify as an expert, but I've restored a few dozen of these old brushes over the past year, and I've got some idea of what's going on within the handle.

Basically, what holds the hairs into the brush is a little round disc or plug of hardened glue into which each of the brush hairs is embedded. (The hair and glue plug combination is called a "knot", but it's not actually a knot in the literal sense.) The composition of the glue plug and the care with which the brush hairs are distributed throughout the plug are basically what determine whether and when your brush will start shedding hairs.

Now, if the hairs are set into the glue plug absolutely, dead-on perfect, then every single hair in the knot will be surrounded by and held into place on all sides by a quantity of glue. Imagine that you had a brush that was only made up of 5 or 10 hairs -- each hair would be completely separated from its neighbors and surrounded by 360 degrees of glue.

The problem is that this kind of perfection isn't possible in real brushes, so manufacturers do the best they can to distribute the hair evenly throughout the plug and make sure that this distribution leads to glue in contact with almost all of the hairs on almost all of their sides. Poorly made brushes, on the other hand, have thick "clumps" of hair where there is no glue at all in the interior of the "clump" and only glue around the outer perimeter of the "clump." This means that hairs in the clump's interior are only being held in by friction and not glue, and those are the hairs that you will see fall out after you give the brush a good washing or first start to use the brush when it is new.

And it's also possible, after many, many years of use, for the glue plug to fail completely -- it gets dried out, cracked or simply disintegrates, and then you don't have just a few hairs shedding. You can literally pull out the entire badger knot with just your hands. This doesn't really happen to newer brushes.

So the bottom line is this -- it's ok to have a new brush shed a few hairs, because there will always been a few hairs in the knot that are just not held as firmly in the glue plug, and those will always fall out with normal use. What's left is still more than enough to make for a perfectly functional brush. Where you should be concerned, however, is when the brush continues to shed hairs and doesn't show any sign of abating, even after two weeks or so of use. At that point, I'd be inclined to say that your brush contains a poorly assembled knot, as there are too many clumped hairs in the glue plug, and these will continue to fall away as you use the brush. A brush like that should be sent back to the vendor.

Anyway, I hope this helps!

By the way, drying the brush upside down doesn't prevent the hairs from falling out of the brush. Drying upside down simply keeps all of the gunk that's dissolved in the water from drying and depositing itself into the handle area of the brush, where it can't really be washed away the next time you use it. Imagine filling the same drinking glass with water, again and again, and then dumping the water out after you're finished, leaving the glass to dry right side up. Eventually, you end up with a hard, white deposit of gunk on the bottom and sides of the glass. If you dry the glass upside down, you let the water run off the glass and onto the table or towel. And that's why you dry your brush upside down.

So the bottom line is after almost 3 months it should not be doing it.