For Really Clean Brushes

       I'm a big fan of Ulta. I am also a huge fan of sales. Ulta had a sting of sales events recently, plus I got double points in my birthday month, AND they extended double points for me through the end of April. So between all of that and gift cards, I got new things at Ulta. Some of it I think even model horse people would be excited about. 
      I have mentioned the Ulta beauty solid soap before, and I stand by it as an excellent product. I have tried several of the spray brush cleaners. I don't feel that any of them ever got my brushes particularly clean and all of them had a very strong smell. Some of them are floral, some are citrus, all of it is overpowering if you are cleaning a whole bunch of brushes. And then the smell lingers... not good. The Ulta solid soap doesn't really have any smell to it. It just cleans brushes well. Or I thought it did. In one of my recent orders I picked up this silicone brush cleaner from Jcat. There are a ton of different kinds of silicone brush cleaners. This just happened to be the one in stock when I put in an order. Bonus points for being pink and only $4.99. I also feel it is worth every penny! I have a foundation brush which I have cleaned and it still looked dirty. I have not used it since the last time I washed it. Today I decided to clean it again. I swirled it in the soap and scrubbed it along the silicone cleaner and holy cow! SO much more foundation came out! I went through the process a couple more times because dried foundation is gross. But this seems like a really winning combination to me. 

     As an example, here are 3 of my brushes before I cleaned them and after I cleaned them. Most of the eyeshadow I use is highly pigmented and it did leave some staining. But as you can see, I went from very dark and dingy brushes to much lighter and brighter. I am really happy about this. 

      It is possible that no one cares other than me, but I got a bunch of new brushes the recently as well. The pink ones are JS11 blunt packer brushes and the white ones are JS6 rule blender brushes, which are a somewhat smaller blending brush, which makes it really great for all sorts of things. I guess that potentially makes them good for pasteling horses. I might have to try it. 

     I imagine not a lot of people made it this far. They saw that I was talking about makeup or brushes and just didn't care to keep going. I guess there is the potential that people read the title and decided not to click on this post at all. I get it, not everyone is interested in all the things that I am interested in. And not all of my posts are interesting, lol. 
      In other, completely model horse hobby related news, I was on Fabian's model horse Zoom chat the other day, which was super fun, and I was peer pressured (it took no effort on anyone's part) into doing something I have never done before. I bought a ticket to Breyerfest. I do eventually want to attend Beyerfest, in person, in Kentucky. But the online format is intriguing, and makes it possible for me to "attend". I have no idea what this will all look like, but until Breyer announces the details at the end of the month, no one really knows. Then I got all weird and crazy and also entered the Breyerfest open performance show. Again, not having to actually GO to Kentucky and deal with the craziness of the open show (which is legendary), it seems like a nice idea. Plus it was not expensive. Depending on the format they choose it may or may not work out well for me. But again, it's intriguing and definitely something I have never done before. But I'm in good company, since no one else had ever done a Breyerfest open show online. Maybe it is setting up our live show entries and taking a photo, or several photos from different angles (I kind of hope so). Maybe it is going to be more like a photo show where we need to also have nice, realistic backgrounds, which sort of puts me right out of things. I have nowhere to do traditional photo show photos these days. But I can certainly set up a table in my living room or in my yard and set up live show entries and take photos. So we'll see. All of this is speculation on my part because I have no idea what it will be like until Breyer announces things. But I love performance showing and I was thinking I need to start setting up some performance entries just to play a bit. Being limited to only Breyer models sort of sucks, but I do have 4 OF Breyers that I can play with. I don't own any custom breyers, so I can only show in OF performance. Again, totally fine, I can make it work. This could be very interesting...