How to Clean Your Makeup Brushes, A Step-by-Step Guide

Prolong the life for your makeup brushes—and keep germs away—by keeping them clean! We’re sharing a step-by-step guide for how to clean your makeup brushes, below!

We’re going to let you in on a little secret: skin care doesn’t end with your AM and PM regimens. In fact, it never really ends. Just like you take the time to nourish your body with well-balanced meals, stay hydrated by drinking water, and get your blood pumping through exercising, you should also make a conscious effort to take care of your body’s largest organ at all times.

One way to do so is by ensuring that you are cleansing not just your skin, but your smartphone and makeup brushes, as well. Makeup brushes can double as breeding grounds for bacteria, especially if they are not cleansed regularly, stored properly, used on the skin during a break out—or worse…shared with a friend. Even if your skin isn’t oily and doesn’t experience breakouts, the buildup of product and the germs transferred from your fingers can contaminate your brushes, which, in turn, can wreak havoc on the skin. And, if you share your brushes with a friend, the oil from their skin, or bacteria from their breakout can latch onto your makeup brushes and be slathered across your face the next time you go to use them. No thank you!

Cleansing your makeup brushes is simple and inexpensive. You can purchase a cleanser, like NYX Professional Makeup Brush Cleaner—which is non-abrasive and can provide your brushes with a deep cleanse.There are a number of ways that you can cleanse your brushes—from giving them a nice soak, to scrubbing them with a cleansing glove—but, we prefer to dunk ours into a glass filled with the cleansing solution and massage the grime out of the bristles with our fingertips—wash your hands first!—rinsing with lukewarm water as we go to ensure that we are not adding the loosened grit back into our glass of brush cleanser.

Once we’ve managed to get our brushed squeaky clean, we lay them flat on a hand towel—you can also use a paper towel—making sure that they are in the correct shape before letting them air dry for the night. To speed things up, you could blow dry your bristles on low—however, this can mess with the shape of the brush head, so it is best to avoid doing every time you cleanse—which should be about once a week, by the way. Another way to speed up the cleansing—and drying—process is to use a makeup brush cleaner that comes in a spray form, like NYX Professional Makeup On The Spot Makeup Brush Cleaner Spray. To clean your brushes with this On The Spot cleanser, all you need to do is spritz a paper towel with the solution and gently rub the makeup brushes across the paper towel until the dirt is removed. This quick and easy cleansing technique can be great when on the go, but you don’t want to get too comfortable with surface cleansing. When you can, make sure to give your brushes the deep clean they deserve.