Just Like New

Once upon a time I use to buy a brand new hair brush after about a year. I’m sure you’ve seen your brushes about that milestone–when you remove the hair and there’s a blanket of fuzz at the base of your bristles.

I don’t throw my brush away anymore. Instead I clean it!

I’m going to pick up in this process after the hair removal and using a pair of tweezers to push all that fuzz to the tip of the bristles.

Don’t be afraid of you can’t get everything to the tips. I find that when I’ve done this step, I end up getting my brushes cleaner than if I leave the fuzz down at the base. The reason is because I use glue. The glue binds the debris at the top. But it also drips down to the brush base. It then grabs a hold of the debris that is still around the bristles base. By moving as much as you can to the top, it enables the glue to maximize how much it captures at the base.

The glue that I use is Elmer’s white glue–the same glue used by school children in the U.S. The reason why I use this type of glue is because it has a little bit of elasticity when it’s dry and holds together even when it’s not fully dry. It’s tacky, but it holds on to the debris and itself. Plus it has the added bonus of washing off.

More rigid glue tends to stick to the bristles and brush.

For example, you could use hot glue. But there’s not much give once it cools. And because it’s more rigid, you run the risk of damaging the bristles (like pulling off the balls on the end), which will in turn ruin the health of your hair.

If I were to locate alternate glue, might pick a wood glue or rubber cement. Both of these have a similar property as Elmer’s glue.

When applying the glue you can be as meticulous air as liberal as you choose. You can open the orange cap and apply the glue precisely along the rows and columns. Or you can take the glue cap off and cover surface area quickly. If you choose the quick method, make sure you hit every area where you pulled debris up to the tip of the bristles. If there’s no glue on the debris, then nothing is binding it together to make it easier to pull off.

At this point timing is everything.

I applied the glue after I used my brush for the day and I let the glue sit over night to dry. (Even still, I used a liberal amount of glue so the glue wasn’t dried come morning. This was okay because my schedule had the space for not needing my brush and for finishing this cleanup project.)

Last year when I cleaned my brush I think I went the more precise method because the glue was dried come morning. This year the glue was still too wet so I had to use my hair drier to help the glue set.

As you can see here, the debris on the top was dry. So I could easily start peeling those bits off my brush. However the glue on the base had pooled together thickly and was most definitely that wet brilliant white.

I removed the debris that was dried. This opened up the air flow for when I used my hair drier to set the rest of the glue.

TIP: If you don’t want to wait over night, use a hair drier to set the glue in a quicker time frame. You can have your brush clean and ready to use that same day.

Cleaning the base can be a little trickier. It seems like all the brushes that I have, each bristles is inserted into the base in a V formation, so the tail is pointing up alongside the bristles. This elbow joint likes to hold on to debris. This is why I like using glue. It helps to gram on to those difficult to reach debris. But it also means that I also need to use a pair of tweezers to get in there and get the glue to lift with the debris.

Sometimes you can just run the tweezers between the bristles. And in other moments you need to grasp the bottom of the bristle with the tweezers and pull up toward the top.

The good news is that you can completely clean your brush without having to be satisfied with that ring of debris hanging out at the bottoms of your bristles.

As you can see here, I was able to remove all that fuzz debris that was on the bottoms of my brush. This is the third time that I’ve cleaned this brush. And all the protective balls, on the ends of the bristles, are intact.

As I mentioned before, I grew up where we just disposed of brushes when they were “dirty”/ a blanket of fuzz remained when the hair was all removed. But I found out that it doesn’t have to be that way. A brush can have extended life.

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What is something that you use to throw away but found a way to extend its life?