How I Dry My Makeup Brushes: Brush Tree Review

Hi lovely readers,

It should be no surprise to you that I’ve become more and more interested in makeup in addition to nail polish. Accordingly, my brush collection has grown a LOT, and I recently decided that the old method of hanging my brushes to dry on a clothes hanger with some hair ties just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So, I bought a brush tree! Benjabelle is a well-known brush tree manufacturer, but at NZ$31.95+++ for a single brush tree, I just couldn’t buy them when I knew there had to be a cheaper alternative on eBay. And I found one – a NZ$15 option, straight from eBay.

The brush tree itself comes wrapped in a protective brown seal, which you need to peel off before using. I was actually very confused, and was sure I had been ripped off/sent the wrong brush tree before I realised I had to peel the brown stuff off to reveal the black underneath.

The tree fits 16 small brushes, 6 medium brushes, and 4 large brushes – a total of 26, and if you’re stuck for space you can stick at least two or three small brushes together in the large brush holes. It comes in three pieces like this.

As handy as this is, there were a couple of minor things that I didn’t like, and am sure wouldn’t have been an issue had I purchased the Benjabelle brush tree. Firstly, there was some odd white paint(?) residue on some of the brush holes – you can see this in the above photo if you click to enlarge. Also, some of the ‘teeth’ in the brush holes hadn’t been separated properly and were still stuck together, like in the photo below.

This is pretty easily remedied by pulling the two teeth apart, though. The third thing I wasn’t really digging was the ‘MaaNge’ (mange?) branding on the side. However, these three issues are definitely pretty minor (at least to me) and I’m still happy with this alternative to the other brush tree. There were a couple things that I noticed I had to be more careful about though when drying my brushes – some brushes, like the Crown powder brush you see above, can’t be pulled right through the hole to be taken out of the tree – it’s too big. Instead, it needs to be carefully wriggled out from the bottom, which can be a little difficult because the teeth are quite grippy. I also sometimes worry about damaging my natural hair brushes on the silicone teeth, so I tend to remove them using this method too.

Overall, I’m happy to finally have a dedicated tool for drying my brushes and will definitely keep using it as I need 🙂

How do you dry your makeup brushes?

Lexie xx