Elder millennial that I’m, I typically discover myself feeling humbled and out of contact throughout our weekly magnificence conferences when Vogue’s chronically on-line, gimlet-eyed editors talk about viral developments that I’ve by no means heard of. Nonetheless, once they just lately recounted the Gen Z TikTok obsession with an costly heritage hairbrush model I used to be delighted to listen to the identify dropped with curiosity. “Mason Pearson?”
My head whipped up from my Slack messages, “Oh! That’s one thing I truly really feel passionately about!” You see, The Mason Pearson brush is, in some ways, the sweetness madeleine of my childhood. (In spite of everything, Proust had nice hair.) For my total life I’ve solely ever seen my mom, the actress, Candice Bergen, use one sort of brush: the plastic paddled, boar-and-nylon bristled British grooming help. The bigger dimension in black on her yellow-and-blue-tiled toilet counter at residence in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, the pocket dimension for journey, which she saved free in her purse after which would place like a talisman on the lodge self-importance lined up subsequent to her make-up brushes and a sq. bottle of Fracas fragrance.
After I turned seven, I began to obtain a reasonably arbitrary weekly allowance. To earn this I needed to feed our Calico cat, Pearl, and brush my canine, Lois (not with a Mason Pearson). A supplemental charge could be awarded for brushing mama’s hair in mattress whereas she learn Enid Blyton to me. The longer I brushed the extra I bought paid, sometimes $1 per 5 minutes, a superb hourly price.
“It’s the one brush I’ve ever used and ever will use!” she cries animatedly over breakfast with my two-year-old, who refuses to make use of any brush in any respect except bribed with M&Ms. “I’d by no means return!” She says she has not purchased a brand new brush in years (this from the lady who loses an iPhone quarterly) and that she first found the comb virtually 60 years in the past within the London neighborhood Mayfair. “After I was 22 and in London for work staying on the Connaught there was a pharmacy throughout the road that offered them.” She was patronizing hair legend Philip Kingsley on the time and his Mayfair salon used the “superior brush.” “You simply knew! It was a unique league!” She mentioned, pissed off by my probing as to what precisely makes a brush superior. “I favored a tough, hearty brush. It had a mixture of bristles and a bouncy base.”
