The workshop is quieter than you would expect. Brush making is not a loud craft — it is a room of people doing something small and exact, repeatedly, with their hands.
A dresser will make perhaps ninety heads in a day. A good one has been doing it for twenty years.
The cannon
Hair is gathered into a small brass cup called a cannon, tapped down so the natural tips align, and shaped entirely by feel. No machine has ever done this convincingly, because the material is irregular and the correction has to happen continuously.
The tap is the whole craft. Too little and the head is loose; too much and it will never come to a point.
What you are paying for
You are paying for the sorting, mostly. Only the hairs with an intact natural tip make it into a good round, and separating them is slow, careful work that no amount of capital speeds up.
It is the reason a properly made brush costs what it does, and the reason it will still be pointing perfectly in a decade.
Written by Ines Delacroix