Really, unless you know the bristles on any two brushes come from the same animal and were processed identically, you're starting off handicapped. To compound that, I'd assume anybody doing this "for fun" is going to use old brushes, and not buy new ones just for this. As such, the history of the brush would impact the bristles' ability to absorb/dry from one brush to the next. At a really drilled-down level of detail, you can't get exactly duplicated test beds.
The only way to do this right is going to start with somebody going out and shavin' their own hog.
I would only use different brushes for comparing natural hair (boar) to synthetic hair. I should have made that clear. I wouldn't use two brushes of the same model. Also, I should have mentioned that I have a humidity and temperature monitor, so I'd put that nearby the brush and record the readings when I'd make the mass measurements. You might have a point about new versus old brushes. My synthetic brush is new, hardly used, and my boar brush is old, having been used for over ten months of nearly daily use, so it has a lot of bent and broken hairs. These are two very different setups. When coupled with "maximally wet" and "minimally wet" and hanging vs. standing at the start of drying, that would be a good test matrix of 2 * 2 * 2 = 8 combinations, I think. I'm not promising that I'll do these experiments, but I'm saying that I might do it, and if I do, this is how I'd do it.
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