Kabuki Brush

Benefits To 'Buffing' Your Makeup?

The Kabuki brush origin is in Japanese theatre, where it was designed to accommodate quick, heavy and dramatic makeup application. Japanese Kabuki theatre makeup has in particular, an extreme look of expression display through stylized makeup design.

The brush became the first choice (ironically) to serving the touted 'natural' appeal of mineral makeup and because of the growth in popularity of mineral makeup, so has this brush design. The kabuki's properties of more dense, slightly more coarse, bristles and a over sized fluffy, dome shaped head, on a very short handle, lend themselves well to the logistics of mineral makeup.

Why the Kabuki suits mineral makeup...

Mineral makeup is ground into loose powders that are then brushed or 'buffed' onto the skin. This type of brush picks up and places more makeup than a regular powder brush. Plus its distinctively stubby handle creates a good grip for the 'buffing action' application technique. Kabuki bristles can be made with a variety of natural animal, synthetic or combination hair; sable, goat, badger, can effectively distribute loose face powders... it has been most popularly combined with mineral makeup. Companies that sell mineral makeup, promote the kabuki brush style as the ideal application tool.

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Some very successful mineral makeup companies include Bare Escentuals, Sheer Cover, Jane Iredale and Pur Minerals. This is just a handful of top companies from an every growing list.

Award winning Bare Escentuals Bare Minerals SPF Foundation (shown left) is the product that started the whole "mineral makeup revolution" and they also brought attention to the type of brush, we now all know to be the kabuki brush.

Bare Escentuals Kabuki (shown above) is popular but other companies have made improvements on it. Your budget and makeup choices will dictate how much you are willing to pay...one of the less expensive brushes available for mineral makeup application is by Bare Escentuals Full Coverage Kabuki and one of the more expensive is by NARS...just how much difference between the two in quality and performance, is hard to say.