TikTok is a particularly handy app when it comes to beauty hacks, with professional makeup artists and amateurs posting tutorials on how to do everything from slugging to layering skincare products correctly. Recently, there's been an uptick in videos on how to properly clean makeup brushes. In fact, the hashtag #cleaningmakeupbrushes has been used 61.9 million times alone.
These hacks required very little supplies on my part; most of them I could find around my house. My methodology was simple: try to clean my makeup brushes with the most amount of gunk. I tested five popular hacks I found on TikTok. Before starting, I checked in with celebrity makeup artist and beauty expert Renée Loiz on what to avoid so I don't accidentally tarnish my tools for the sake of this experiment.
"Alcohol can be extremely drying to makeup brushes," she warned. "They can become dry and frizzy and also loosen the glue that binds the bristles to the brush handle." Thankfully, none of the most popular hacks included alcohol, so I got to cleaning. Here's what I learned.
Don't waste your money on fancy devices.
The first hack I tried was a device you can buy on Amazon — posts about it have gone viral. It was about the size of my palm and made from plastic. The instructions said to put a little water in the basin and turn it on to allow the machine to gently swirl the brushes clean. Like a TikToker suggested, I added a tiny drop of my regular hair shampoo.
Things get hyped up on TikTok for a reason, so I had high hopes for this one. However, it was a bust. The device only came with a USB plug, so I had to scramble to find a wall unit. The directions said to "long hold" the button to change speeds, but I could never figure it out so it limped along at the slowest speed. The brush I tried to clean swished around in its dirty water, and I had to manually scrub the brush against the machine to get anything off, defeating the purpose of the automation. I emptied and refilled the device with water and a tiny drop of shampoo twice, but there was still a lot of makeup left on the brush. I would say this one is not worth the $19.
Some hacks cost nothing…and do nothing.
I saw one TikTok video where the user simply used a strainer and water to clean their brushes. So I retrieved a strainer I already had in the kitchen (don't worry, I washed it before this experiment, and of course after). Like the TikTok showed, I ran some water over it and pushed the brush around the strainer. But hardly anything came off the brush, despite my best efforts.
Dish soap is a hack hero for a reason.
The third method I tried was plain dish soap and water. I squirted a little dish soap onto a makeup brush cleaning mitt I had and swished the brush around, rinsing with water. This got every speck of dirt and grime off of the makeup brush, most of it on the first pass.
When these other methods failed, I used dish soap and water to get the remaining product off that was left on the brush —that's how effective it was. This is an easy and low-cost way to clean your brushes and there is a reason it gets recommended time and time again: it works.
Don't put vinegar on your makeup brushes unless you want them to smell like vinegar.
I was excited about how the dish soap and water cleaned my brushes, so I thought that dish soap and vinegar would also be a winning combination. The instructions for this one were more complicated; I put one cup of hot water, one tablespoon of dish soap, and one tablespoon of white vinegar into a jar. I swirled my brushes around and let them sit for 20 minutes. I knew that they'd get clean because dish soap had already proven to be a miracle worker, but the overwhelming smell of vinegar was hard to reckon with because it lingered. I had to double-wash my brushes with dish soap and water to get the smell out.
Olive oil is not easy to get off makeup brushes.
The final hack involved hot water, dish soap, and olive oil. I put all three into a jar and swirled my brushes around in it. I knew that the dish soap would get my brushes clean, but I was worried about how the olive oil would affect them. Unfortunately, it left an oily residue. TikTok creators claim that the combination of dish soap and olive oil removes dirt, but many in the comments pointed out that olive oil can spoil. So if you have any leftover olive oil on the brushes, it can form bacteria, and you don't want that getting anywhere on your face.
Don't submerge your brushes, and don't use hot water.
This lesson I learned from the comments section in several of the videos where users left their brushes to soak: Hot water can cause the glue to loosen on the bristles and cause them to fall out., so any hacks offering this advice I'd reconsider.
And the winner is…
Plain dish soap and water was the best method for cleaning my makeup brushes by far. Depending on how dirty your brushes are, you might need to go several rounds gently swirling your brushes around a cleaning mitt or mat, but the effort is minimal and so is the cost. It's a gentle method and doesn't risk ruining your brushes.
After cleaning them, don't forget to properly dry them so you can keep them in tip-top shape. Loiz advises squeezing the excess water out of the bristles with a dry paper towel. "Then, I lay them flat to dry overnight on clean paper towels. After they're dry, I store them upright in cylinder containers," she said.
While I don't wear makeup that often, this served as an important reminder that washing makeup brushes don't need to be an intensive, dreaded chore. Just a few squirts of dish soap and some water will do the trick to keep them clean and looking as good as new.
