How I Clean My Makeup Brushes
* This post is dedicated to my lovely mother who made a fatal mistake the other day while cleaning her beauty sponges which ultimately resulted in them disintegrating in her hands. -- I love you mom, but next time, please call me first!!
Well, here we are... finally venturing into the "Makeup" section of my blog. There probably is no better way to start this section off than with clean brushes! Now, I may have a very complicated and time consuming way of cleaning my brushes but I'm broke so I don't have money for fancy cleaning products and sometimes its nice to take a hot minute to yourself and focus on doing a much needed chore like washing your makeup brushes. This procedure honestly doesn't take that much time after you become familiar with the steps.
Let's get some clean brushes (and sponges)!
What I Use:
- Dish soap
- Vinegar
- Hot water
- A couple cups or bowls
- A DIY brush scrubbing board
- A towel
- Dirty makeup brushes and sponges
How I Clean:
My first step is to fill a cup or bowl with 1 part vinegar to 2 parts water plus some dish soap. To be honest, I don't really follow these measurements. I usually just put as much as I feel like without getting too crazy. One by one, I dip a dirty brush into the solution, scrub the bristles (not too hard!) across the scrubbing board, and place into a cup.
* Yes, girl (or guy), my scrubbing board IS made out of a plastic Chinese takeout lid and some hot glue. If you don't have money to buy one, just go get yourself some takeout for dinner so you can use the lid to clean your makeup brushes! They are super simple to make and cleans my brushes a lot better than not having one.
After I've initially scrubbed all of my brushes, I rinse them and the scrubbing board off really well. I then add some soap directly to the scrubbing board and run my brushes along them one more time before rinsing and laying them out to dry. This second clean is especially important for my most used brushes. I often see more dirt come off of them in the second wash which make me feel more comfortable that they are cleaner.
If you're in a bit of a rush to get your brushes cleaned and dry, like I am most of the time, instead of laying them out to dry, which can take forever, I get my hairdryer and dry them off mostly with warm heat on the highest power setting before laying them out to finish drying.
Now that you have clean brushes, we have some work to do on those sponges!
Cleaning beauty sponges is the most annoying task for me but I also want them to be as clean and sanitary as possible. Kind of like the brushes, I put the soap, vinegar, and water mixture into a bowl big enough that I can stick my hand in. I squeeze the sponge a bazillion times until I can see that all of the makeup on the outside is cleaned off. You then want to squeeze your sponges under running water to get as much of the dirty water and soap out of the sponge as you possibly can.
Here is where things can go south if you don't follow these directions! You want to fill a clean bowl with only water so that about half of your sponge is under the water. Make sure that your sponge is also filled with water. To get my sponges extra clean, I then place this bowl of water in the microwave for 30 seconds. I let the water cool for about 2 minutes and then take it out of the microwave.
Sometimes I find that this process brings more makeup to the surface of the sponge so I repeat the soap and vinegar steps and then the microwave step until I'm satisfied with how well the sponges have been cleaned. You want to squeeze the water out of your beauty sponge and set it out to dry. I would not recommend blow dryer the sponges, and they work better damp anyways.
The entire brush and beauty sponge cleaning process probably took me about an hour this time but this is also not my entire brush set. I only cleaned my most used brushes for the sake of the post so keep in mind that the time frame can vary depending on how my objects you have to clean and how thoroughly you clean them.
This is not the only way to clean brushes but it's my favorite so far. Share your favorite ways to clean your makeup brushes and beauty sponges and also share some of your makeup brush cleaning horror stories so that we can all learn from each other!!
* From my mother - Do not clean your beauty sponges with bleach! It will clean them so good that they won't even exist anymore!!
