Description
Hand-tied, hand-filled shaving brush from France, with a 26mm “extra stuffed” knot that’s a combination of boar hair and silvertip badger hair, which is the top grade for the badger fur. Supposedly, this has +33% more weight of hair per unit of volume than the mid-tier super badger model, but it is also +3mm of diameter, so they’re hardly comparable. These brushes weigh ~85g, so pretty sizeable things. ~115mm overall height, ~61mm from top of ringlet to base of handle, ~26mm handle waist, ~25.5x56mm knots which feel extreeemely dense.
Dark horn handle; I don’t know if this horn is water buffalo or cow horn, as they don’t specify, but in any case it is domestic farmed horn from France, born in captivity from parents of captivity. TI buys whichever pieces look best (between bovine/buffalo) at the time between the two common species.
All components come from EU farming (hair stocks), and all labor is EU production. EU-farmed badger is a little ‘curious’ – it is just a little different, even though the species is exactly the same meles meles as the dominant exporting from China. I’d say their silvertip-designated strands run a bit more grey than white as CN raised silvertip.
It would be fair to say that while these hair strands are unique, the knot canopy is much less so; to my knowledge (= I feel strongly, but cannot prove, that some no-name “house brand” brush is still made in France by a tiny brush maker you’ve never heard of still French-stubborn enough to use the EU hair stocks, and likely never even bother to expand their market beyond France and perhaps a few neighbors), only Plisson has both EU fur and those distinctly French canopies for the knots. These knots look like others in the EU, sharing a similar canopy dowel. They could almost pass for German.
The boar seems exactly the same, to me anyways, as any you’ll find. But combining boar and badger, and odd badger at that, makes for a neat brush.
Pity the USFWS are so difficult; I can’t speak toward importing badger fur products via you-know-where, because it seems like they get a hall pass to get in to the USA for a lower cost and a lower trouble than anyone else (there ain’t no damn way those brushes could be soooo cheap if there was any other explanation!), but when it comes to getting European-made badgerstuffs in to the USA, I can tell you from extensive professional experience that here in the post-Brexit, post-pandemic time it is DAMN hard! As I write this, USFWS wants – insists, actually – that I must make the official declaration that the parcel’s en route before it enters the country, the shipping company’s people cannot do that on my behalf. But they also want a customs entry # on that form, which you cannot obtain until it has actually entered the country, because that # doesn’t exist prior (shrug emoji here).
So, the flowchart as I write to you today is 1) get the invoice from the exporter once the box is in the shipper’s possession, 2) log in to the USFWS site and make the declaration 3) USFWS rejects it for not having a parcel customs # [which you cannot possibly obtain until it actually is in the USA] 4) beg by email to the people at DHL/FedEx/UPS, who do NOT like to be bothered, for that #, because USFWS has made it abundantly clear that *I*, and NOT DHL/FedEx/UPS, must enter that # in to the USFWS form 5) the DHL/FedEx/UPS USFWS specialists finally respond when they feel like it, and send that precious parcel number 6) upload that precious parcel info to USFWS site and re-submit the official declaration 7) USFWS releases the parcel, and you’ll receive it one or two days later 8) don’t forget the most important part, burying the lead here…the maximum number of inventory units with any dead animals is only twenty-four units or $5000 value, whichever is lower…so, you only get to import two dozen shaving brushes per attempt, for allllll that hoop jumping just described.
Can you imagine all that fuss over some farmed badger fur?!? Is it really worth it when synthetic shaving brushes have come so far? Only you can decide the ‘worth’ portion, but the overhead just described, when divided by only twenty-four bullets, is quite substantial. But these strict rules, which only ramped up in the last couple of years, are why you will not see small vendors really trying to sell you EUROPEAN badger brushes, like Plisson or Mühle or the like.
100% Made in France.
Lathed horn handle with Thiers-Issard logo on the bottom.
