Items by bjrn

Taylor of Old Bond Street makes a synthetic brush. I think it's a fairly new addition to their range of brushes because I have read hardly anything about it. It's a lovely little brush, and it is my favourite of all synthetic brushes available right now. The model I have is the B16, which is the medium size, Taylor's has both smaller and larger models. The other synthetic brushes all have picked one type of hair of a specific material with specific characteristics (thickness...

Rooney is a big name in badger brushes, but they also make a synthetic brush. It looks nice enough, with a pleasant handle. However there are problems with this brush, possibly stemming from Rooney thinking that what is good when making a badger brush is good when making a synthetic brush. The biggest problem with the Rooney is that it is very densely packed. While that might be a desirable attribute in a badger brush, it's not what you want in a brush with relatively stiff synthetic...

The Muhle brush, while well-built didn't manage to make it into my list of favourites. It's got a Muhle handle, which feels and looks nice, and has got hairs of a material Muhle calls "Toray". The material is probably the coarsest synthetic out there at the moment, but other than that are very much like what you'd get in a Men-U or Rooney. In fact, the Muhle synthetic is very much like the Men-U with the difference of the sturdier handle and coarser hairs. They are about the same...

The cheap synthetic Omega brush gets called Syntex or Sintex (mine has "Sintex" printed on the handle), but the big ones don't have a name, so I'm dubbing this the Omega Big Boy. While it may not look much bigger than the Sintex, it weighs twice as much. This is probably mostly to do with the handle I have. Omega sells the Big Boy in twelve different handled models (I don't know how much/if the loft and knot sizes vary between the models). Other than the brand, the Sintex and Big Boy...

The Body Shop makes a synthetic brush which retails for about $10, and isn't all that bad, although clearly you shouldn't expect miracles from a brush this cheap. I should mention that the brush I have here is the one that The Body Shop introduced somewhere in 2007. The model they had before that had all-white hairs and a black ring at the base of the hairs, and was by all accounts a bad brush. I don't know what the models before that one were like. Now that is out of the way, on to the...

Culmak is a British company, who make a few boar bushes and shaving soaps, they also make a synthetic brush. I wish they didn't. I can see how it all started. They decided they wanted to make a cheap synthetic brush, cheaper than the cheapest available. They found the Omega Sintex and proceeded to make a cheap knock-off, the Culmak Vega Nylon Bristle Shaving Brush (that's what they call it). I don't know where to start. The handle manages to feel cheaper than the Omega's, and that...