As every beauty blogger and makeup lover will know, it's so important to wash your makeup brushes. Now don't get me wrong, washing the little eyeshadow brushes is a dream and even therapeutic at times because they clean so easily. It's the liquid makeup brushes that take an age to clean properly and leaves you wondering whether it would just be easier to buy a new brush every time it needs washing. Some have claimed that baby shampoo does the trick, but if you're using a high coverage foundation, for me it doesn't work. At all. I use the Real Techniques Buffing Brush to work my foundation into my skin which means that it's well used and needs a deep cleansing every time.

I also found that just swilling the brush in the palm of my hand did next to nothing either and for someone with sensitive skin it's not ideal when you have about thirty brushes to wash in one go. I bought a little makeup brush washer thing from Primark for £2.50 over a year ago which turned my life around when it came to washing those stubborn brushes. It got into the brush and meant that they were washed so much quicker than they used to be. As much as I want the Sigma cleaning mat or the new Real Techniques tray thing I'm not forking out for something that works just as well as a silicone oven glove that you can buy for about £4 from ebay.

To properly cleanse my brushes I use the Mac brush cleanser or the Real Techniques version which isn't as good. You can tell that the Mac one is exactly the same as the Estée Lauder one - the bottles are almost identical, as is the liquid inside. I mean you'd expect that since Estée Lauder owns Mac Cosmetics so some products will overlap, and the Mac one is cheaper so no point wasting extra money for the same product. You know what my secret is though? Egg cups. No word of a lie. In September 2014 I moved into my third year flat with my boyfriend and the previous tenants had left behind some almost new egg cups in a drawer. The idea shot into my head - soaking the brush upside down with the bristles in the egg cup with the brush cleanser and a bit of warm water in would help dissolve some of the makeup. Sometimes you'll go to wash these stubborn brushes and they don't wash through on the first time. Soaking them upside down with the bristles covered in the cleanser means that you can leave them there for an hour and come back to wash them and it will halve the time you're sat swilling it around in trying to get it all off. I mean this would work the same with a tall tupperware box as long as you don't fill the cleanser and water higher than the neck of the brush as this has a high chance of wearing away the glue and leaving your brushes thin with bristles falling out.

I know there have been systems invented to wash and dry your brushes but I'm not forking out for something so expensive when I can use my little egg cups and still get the job done in an hour. I only use the egg cups for stubborn brushes - so for foundation, concealer, and anything else liquidy. I'm not going to come out and say it's revolutionary because I'm sure everyone has their own ways of washing their makeup brushes, but it does stop it being such a chore.


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