Review: MAC 239 Brush

After the huge success of my ELF Studio Brush review, it seems some of you want me to review my entire brush collection!! I thought I'd do them individually, the ELF write up took me quite a few hours! MAC first, I think. I'm busy testing my Sigma brushes. I'm one full week into it, I want to give it a full month before getting into the review. I haven't quite decided yet on how to structure those reviews!

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 MAC 239 brush costs £17.00 and is sold on the MAC UK website. It's on the other worldwide sites as well, but since I'm in the UK, that's the website and pricing I'll use. It cost me less than £17.00 when I bought it, but that was some time ago!


The MAC 239 brush was the very first MAC brush that I bought, way back in 2003. Yes, I've really had this brush for 6 years! That photo was taken about an hour ago, after 6 years of heavy use! Previous to this brush I had only used cheap brush sets. I hadn't actually believed that the brushes you were using could make much of a difference to your make up, but I was wrong. This one brush has changed my eye make up completely! In the 6 years I've had this brush I don't think it's ever lost more than one or two hairs while washing.

The 239 is made from white goat hair that has a firm, but not stiff texture. The goat hair feels very soft The head is densely packed with hair but isn't too solid. There's still plenty of "give" to the brush when you apply colour to your eyes, but the brush is firm enough to pick up plenty of colour in one go. I find that these bristles grab the colour you are using very well as the denseness of the head means the bristles are packed closely together. The only issue I've found is that sometimes I wish it were a tiny bit wider. I don't have a huge lid area, but sometimes I think the brush is a little too small.

This brush is described as an "eye shader brush" on the MAC website. I use this brush to pack on lid colours, either pressed powders or pigments. I haven't had much success using this brush for creams. I used to use it for applying pigments wet. It worked fine, but I switched to synthetic brushes for that which works so much better than this. This brush picks up a really good amount of colour when you want to pack it on to your lid, but I found it doesn't work so well as a crease brush or for blending. Others do use it like that but I prefer not to.

After 6 years of heavy use, and with cleaning several times a week, this brush still looks brand new. OK, so the writing has worn of the handle but the bristles look spotless. It does occasionally get stained when I've used a particularly strong colour (blue pigments especially for some reason!), but it has always faded after a few more washes.

I think this is the one MAC brush that I will never be without in my collection and I'm quite tempted to pick up another!