Bombshell Oval Cushion Brush — 8⅞″ Boar & Nylon

An oval cushion brush is the one you use before anything else. It is not a styling tool — it is what gets the hair untangled, lying flat and ready, so that whatever comes next has something to work with.

At eight and seven eighths of an inch this is the full-size one, and the oval head covers ground quickly on a long head of hair.

Boar and nylon on a rubber pad

Two bristle types doing two jobs, and neither one could do both.

The nylon is stiffer. It parts the hair, pushes into the length and gets through a tangle rather than catching in it. That is the bristle doing the actual work of detangling.

The boar polishes behind it. Boar sits close in structure to human hair and carries the scalp's own oil down the strand, which is where the shine comes from — your own oil moved down the length, not anything added to it. Hair brushed properly with boar looks conditioned without any product on it.

Both sit in a rubber cushion pad rather than a solid back. The pad gives as the brush travels over the curve of the skull, so the bristles stay in contact instead of skidding off the high points, and any snag lifts the pad rather than pulling at the hair.

Prepping for a blowout

This is the step most people skip and then wonder why the blowout took an hour.

Dry hair with tangles in it fights a round brush the whole way. Every knot has to be worked out with a brush that was designed to shape hair rather than untangle it, under heat, which is where breakage comes from. Five minutes with this beforehand and the round brush glides.

Same principle before bed, before washing, and before putting product in.

How to use it

Start at the ends. Take the bottom two inches, clear the tangles from those, then move up an inch and repeat. Working from the top down drags every tangle in the length into one knot at the bottom.

Once it is clear, long slow passes from the roots all the way through. That is the pass that moves the oil, and it is the one worth taking your time over.

Be gentler on wet hair. Hair is at its most fragile wet.

The pouch

It comes with a travel pouch, which is not a marketing accessory. A brush loose in a bag gets its bristles bent against everything else in there, and bent bristles do not spring back.

Looking after it

Clear the shed hair out of the pad regularly. Boar holds onto shed hair more than nylon, so this one needs it more often than a nylon-only brush, and once hair mats down between the rows the pad stops flexing.

Do not soak it. Water gets into the cushion, and it does not come back out.

Where it came from

Peter Louis spent twenty-three years behind a chair in Manhattan — a salon on 57th Street, and years of blowouts before that, nine in the morning until ten at night. A supplier would bring a sample, it got used on clients, and it went back with a list of what was still wrong. That went on for years until one came back right.