Elder millennial that I am, I often find myself feeling humbled and out of touch during our weekly beauty meetings when Vogue’s chronically online, gimlet-eyed editors discuss viral trends that I have never heard of. However, when they recently recounted the gen-Z TikTok obsession with an expensive heritage hairbrush brand I was delighted to hear the name dropped with curiosity. “Mason Pearson?”
My head whipped up from my Slack messages, “Oh! That is something I actually feel passionately about!” You see, The Mason Pearson brush is, in many ways, the beauty madeleine of my childhood. (After all, Proust had great hair.) For my entire life I have only ever seen my mother, the actress, Candice Bergen, use one type of brush: the plastic paddled, boar-and-nylon bristled British grooming aid. The larger size in black on her yellow and blue tiled bathroom counter at home in Coldwater Canyon in Los Angeles, the pocket size for travel, which she kept loose in her purse and then would place like a talisman on the hotel vanity lined up next to her makeup brushes and a square bottle of Fracas perfume.
When I turned seven, I started to receive a fairly arbitrary weekly allowance. To earn this I had to feed our Calico cat, Pearl, and brush my dog, Lois (not with a Mason Pearson). A supplemental fee would be awarded for brushing mama’s hair in bed while she read Enid Blyton to me. The longer I brushed the more I got paid, typically $1 per five minutes, a good hourly rate.
“It’s the only brush I’ve ever used and ever will use!” she cries animatedly over breakfast with my two-year-old, who refuses to use any brush at all unless bribed with M&Ms. “I would never go back!” She says she has not bought a new brush in years (this from the woman who loses an iPhone quarterly) and that she first discovered the brush almost 60 years ago in the London neighborhood Mayfair. “When I was 22 and in London for work staying at the Connaught there was a pharmacy across the street that sold them.” She was patronizing hair legend Philip Kingsley at the time and his Mayfair salon used the “superior brush.” “You just knew! It was a different league!” She said, frustrated by my probing as to what exactly makes a brush superior. “I liked a hard, hearty brush. It had a mix of bristles and a bouncy base.”
