Your Guide to Owning The Best Luxury Hair Brush
The analogue beauty essential has gone mainstream.
The first beauty product I ever “inherited” wasn’t a lipstick or a fragrance. It was a hairbrush: my mother’s Mason Pearson brush, its dense boar and nylon bristles worn silky smooth from years of use, passed down to me like an heirloom. In our family of thick-haired gals, brushing was never optional. It was maintenance and ritual all rolled into one. Twenty-five years later, I still have this brush.
For many of us, the hairbrush sits firmly in the afterthought category—a checkout-line add-on. But somewhere along the way, that started to change. The brush has come into focus not as a novelty or a TikTok trend but as a serious object of desire. In an era dominated by high-tech tools, the analogue beauty essential is claiming its status as a foundational hair tool. In recent years, luxury hair brands from Sisley Paris to Crown Affair and Oribe have entered the category. But none carries the same legacy as Mason Pearson. Founded in 1885 by London engineer Mason Pearson, the family-owned brand still makes its brushes in the U.K., finishing them largely by hand—a level of craftsmanship reflected in prices that range from roughly $200 to $500.
My second encounter with Mason Pearson came through hairstylist Olivia Colacci. Long before she founded TwentySeven, her Toronto salon and lifestyle boutique in nearby Bloomfield, Colacci was bringing brushes back from Europe for fellow editorial hair artists who couldn’t source them at home. While working fashion week in Paris, she’d visit a tiny professional supply store hidden down an alleyway on Passage de L’Industrie. “If you wanted to see your favourite celebrity hairstylist, you’d just stand outside,” she says. “Everyone stopped there.”
Brushing isn’t an accessory to hair care; it’s where everything begins.
For Colacci, owning a Mason Pearson isn’t indulgent; it’s essential. “If you pull out a junky brush, models don’t trust you,” she says. “But if you pull out a Mason, they relax.” In addition to Mason Pearson, Colacci swears by Y.S. Park, the Japanese-made wooden brushes prized for their hand-carved handles, ergonomic design and longevity—tools she describes as “almost like pieces of art.”
That trust is what gives these brushes their emotional weight. As I watched my mother care for hers, it was clear it wasn’t disposable. I now own three sizes, all in the nylon and boar-bristle blend, and I’ll likely pass one down to my daughter when she’s old enough—a rarity in beauty, where few things follow us across decades.
Part of the shift from brushes being regarded as simply functional to foundational can be attributed to the recent boom in scalp care. As we start to speak more openly about hair loss, postpartum shedding and thinning, brushing and scalp stimulation are also entering the conversation because these practices are widely understood to support circulation and hair health.
This shift also helped give rise to La Bonne Brosse, a French brand launched in 2022 that treats the hairbrush with the same reverence usually reserved for skincare. Founded by friends Flore des Robert and Pauline Laurent, the brand was born from a realization that feels obvious in hindsight: Brushing isn’t an accessory to hair care; it’s where everything begins.
After experiencing intense postpartum hair loss, des Robert noticed that every professional she consulted asked the same question: “Do you have a good brush?” “The market offered almost nothing between cheap plastic and overly technical tools,” she says. What began as a scientific investigation quickly became something more emotional—a small daily ritual that restored her sense of control.
Think of Mason Pearson as the Hermès of hairbrushes, rooted in heritage and longevity. La Bonne Brosse is its modern counterpart—design-led and of-the-moment. I first encountered the brand at Living Beauty, a Toronto boutique that distributes the brushes in Canada, and it was love at first sight. Sculptural and deliberately weighty, the brushes feature softly curved silhouettes, twisted handles and high-gloss colour-saturated lacquered finishes. They are objects meant to live on a vanity, not disappear into a drawer.
“If you pull out a junky brush, models don’t trust you. But if you pull out a Mason, they relax.”
“We knew immediately that this isn’t just another brush,” says Living Beauty’s founder and CEO, Mariam White. “It is made from superior materials, with real efficacy. And it looks good—we’re in the beauty business; it should be beautiful.” Designed for hair texture and scalp sensitivity, the brushes balance function with longevity. Like with Mason Pearson brushes, the price point (roughly $140 to $230) may give pause, White notes, but context matters. “When you think about the cost per use, it’s actually one of the smartest investments you can make.”
Ritual is the common thread. Des Robert says customers write in about making brushing a nightly practice or using it as a moment of connection with their children. It’s an evening routine I share with my own three-year-old after her bath—a quiet pause at the end of the day. This isn’t just about buying a fancy brush. It’s about investing in a moment, one deliberate stroke at a time.
This article first appeared in FASHION’s March 2026 issue. Read more stories from FASHION’s March 2026 issue here and subscribe to the print issue here.
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