Review: MAC 109 Brush

The MAC 109 brush costs £20.50 and is available on the MAC UK website. It's also available from other MAC sites worldwide, along with stores and counters.

I bought this after seeing quite a few YouTube gurus using it to apply foundation. Before this, I hadn't really paid much attention to the MAC face brushes other than the MAC 187 which I had bought previously.

This brush came from the pro store in London during a Bloggers Event trip. Lots of fun.

It's made of natural hair and MAC suggests using this brush for contour powder products. It is, after all, listed as a Small Contour Brush. I have used it for blushers and highlighters and it does a great job of applying those. It's small enough to just deposit highlight on the top of my cheekbones. It's a little too small for pigmented blushers unless you wanted concentrated colour. I prefer a much lighter dusting of colour on my cheeks so I don't tend to use this for blush. It is useful for the less pigmented blushers as the small shape and dense head will pick up quite a bit more powder than bigger blusher brushes.

It is this densely packed head that does make it a very good brush to apply liquid foundation. There are a couple of draw backs to it though but I did use this almost exclusively for my liquid foundation for about 6 months.

To apply liquid foundation with this brush, I pump some foundation onto the back of my hand, dip this brush in so there's a light coating to the tips of the hairs, stipple over my face and then blend. This brush works very well in creating a very even and smooth foundation cover. As it has natural hairs, it does soak up a lot of foundation. I definitely use a lot more when I use this brush as opposed to a synthetic fibre brush. Due to the small brush head and dense hairs, this brush gives me more coverage than some of my other brushes.

One major issue is the shedding! I'm always left with stray black hairs over my face! It's really annoying to have to pick all those off. There's usually 4 or 5. It kind of makes me worried that all the hairs will eventually come out! I do understand that this is because I'm using it for liquid foundation. It requires heavier handling of the brush than if I were using a contour powder.

MAC use a numbering system for their brushes, like a few of the higher end companies do. Those with fewer brushes tend to use names, but MAC have a lot of brushes! The 100 series is for the face, 200 for the eyes and 300 for the lips.

The Sigma SS109 (though they are changing the numbering system) is a pretty much identical brush. It's available from Sigma for $14.00 (shipping on a single brush is $5.60). I've used both and there's virtually no difference between them.