The truth about badger brush knots as we know it...
Right. As you all know, I get bored easily. And I detest guesswork. I think there has been a lot of it in this thread. Too much for my personal liking. So I picked up the phone and called a couple of brushmakers. It bears repeating that by "brushmaker", I mean "manufacture who hand make brush knots, and glue them into handles", not "person who glues brush knots into self made handles".
Here is what I found out...
Badger hair is sourced in China
Everyone uses hair from China, whether it be Chinese, or European brush makers. No exceptions, at least as far as silvertip badger hair is concerned.
There are exactly three types of badger hair - the rest is marketing speak
There is black badger for paint brushes. There is grey for low end brushes. There is silver(tip) for high end brushes. No exceptions. The rest is a marketing ploy to sell grey badger (cheap) with some silvertip (rare and expensive) mixed into the knot to allow for higher prices.
Most badger brushes are machine made, and cut into shape
Thanks many to Hirlau for providing the images. Let me explain what they mean.
http://straightrazorpalace.com/attac...62318_edit.jpg
Front: a bulk of badger hair ready to be processed. Back: finished knots.
http://straightrazorpalace.com/attac...62338_edit.jpg
More bulks. As you can see, they are loosely shaken into a knot shaped form towards the top, but they are most certainly not finished. This happens later, namely here:
http://straightrazorpalace.com/attac...62211_edit.jpg
What you can see in this picture are proto knots ready for processing. They have been put into a metal ring, and the bottom part of the badger hair has been cut off. The bottoms have then been stuffed into a plastic cap filled with glue. What you can see in the picture is the glueing/hardening process.
http://straightrazorpalace.com/attac...62328_edit.jpg
Knots hung up for drying.
Now, here is the missing picture: A hair clipper like machine to cut the knots into shape, bulb or fan.
This is a fast, and efficient process that requires comparatively little manual work. The result, however, is a knot that has been cut into shape. Is that a problem? It depends. See next section...
A high quality brush has not been cut into shape, because fine tips
Much has been said about the "gel like feel" of certain high quality brushes. Rooney, Simpson, Shavemac, Thäter are prime example. The Mühle "Retro" line (at least the one I own), too. Maybe others. Take a magnifying glass. Check the tips of your badger hairs. If they are fine, you have a fine brush.
A high quality, hand made brush is far more labour intensive, and therefore more expensive
Take a look at the machine made brushes above again. Now, think how you could use that process and retain the fine tips. I cannot be sensibly done. Instead, a different process is used. Badger hairs - typically pre-processed to get only the finest quality hairs by a specialised provider - are selected according to length. Then, they are hand bound into a proto knot. This knot is put into a metal ring, and the cord used to keep the knot together is removed. This is why HarryWally got the - wrong! - impression that the Thäter knot had not been hand bound. The bottom of the knot is then glued together, then an additional layer of glue is applied, resulting in the tell tale "foot" of such brushes:
http://straightrazorpalace.com/attac...018_154542.jpg
Additionally, and you will only find this with Shavemac and Thäter brushes, the hair is selected and processed in a way that each brush looks more or less like the other, while Simpson brushes are mostly unique, ie there are wider variances in colour. This has, I must add, absolutely no impact on the performance of the brush, it is simply an aesthetic feature.
Cost of labour and raw materials do not make the real difference
I was wrong here, and I can only offer my apologies for the rant about child labour in sweat shops. The differences for Chinese producers and European ones are negligible. The differences are mostly in:
- Select grade of Europe processed badger hairs: As stated previously, the European brush makers listed above use select grade hairs, resulting in more uniform, and potentially better, knots.
- Grammage: The term "overstuffed" is used a lot, and mostly wrongly. The correct term is "understuffed". If you check the actual "Ringmaß" (ie size of the ring used to hold the knot together), you will find that many cheaper brushes are smaller than they are listed. Additionally, many use less hair per mm than they should, ie the grammage is lower.
And that's it. Riddle solved. On with the shaving show.
I hope you find this useful. It took me 45 minutes to gather that information. I should have done it earlier. Sorry for that.