Hi Friends!
So I found this really cool brush at Marshalls the other day and I wanted to test it out! It is the SOHO Naturals Retractable Kabuki Brush. I have never tried this brand before this brush but I did see a few other brushes from them at Marshalls. According to the (recyclable) packaging, the brush composes of all cruelty-free Nylon bristles.
So initially, the brush comes in two pieces – it has a top / empty cap and then of course the bottom where the brush sits. At first, I had no idea how this was supposed to be retractable. There are no instructions on the packaging so I actually had to look it up. After about 10 minutes of searching and a very helpful review on Amazon, I learned that to put the cap on you pull up the silver casing and then pop the cap on!
The packaging is pretty obviously not the highest quality. I am not talking so much about the bamboo caps but more so about the silver tube. It is kind of difficult to pull up. You have to tightly grab the silver part to get it to move up. The bamboo is not the highest quality either but it doesn’t really bother me all that much. I mean it does what it is supposed to do.
What really threw me off was the smell of the brush. I was playing around with it and rubbing it on my face and then I smelt it. It honestly smells like burnt plastic (it bugs me how many times I had to smell this brush in order to describe how it smells to you). I tried cleaning this brush to get the smell to go away but it didn’t work! It still had that burnt plastic smell which is really off putting.
The brush bristles feel amazing. They are so incredibly soft. The brush is not firmly packed but packed enough to make it a good powder brush. Kabuki brushes are meant for powder products like setting powder, powder foundation, or blush. I do think that this kind of brush would be good for any of those applications.
I particularly like this brush for a loose setting powder or blush (depending on the occasion). I found that this brush did not pick up enough product for foundation or a pressed setting powder. Which is opposite to what SOHO advertises on their website and the packaging for this brush. They say this brush should “pick up more product than a typical powder brush.”
For blush, it didn’t pick up a lot of product but it did give a light “dusting” of blush on the apples of my cheeks. I usually don’t wear my blush like this so that is why I said depending on the occasion. I didn’t like this brush at all for bronzer. It just was too big to sculpt my cheek bones or around my forehead. I don’t recommend it for bronzer.
This isn’t the first brush that I would reach for, even for my loose setting powders. I am not a fan of the short stubby handle either but over all its not a bad brush! The smell is gross, I am hoping after a few more washes that it will fade but I will probably get use out of it every once in while.
Let me know your favorite makeup brushes! Have you ever used a kabuki brush or used anything from SOHO before? I would love to know!
Tayler's Edit 