Is Paint Brush Soap Worth It, or Will Dish Soap Do?
A pot of brush soap costs more than a cheap brush. Painters who've used one for years say when it's worth it, and when dish soap is fine.
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Someone starting out in miniature painting on a tight budget asked r/minipainting for cheap alternatives to brush soap. The artist's soap everyone recommended was expensive where they lived, and their brushes cost a couple of pounds each. They wanted the brushes to last six months instead of six weeks, and dish soap seemed like enough.
The thread split. Some told them to buy the soap anyway, and others named something cheaper. The answer turns on what your brushes are made of, and the thread is clear about where the line sits.
Is the Masters brush cleaner good?
The soap in question is the Masters Brush Cleaner and Preserver, a cake of soap in a small round pot. You wet the brush, swirl it on the cake, work up a lather and rinse. It cleans and conditions in one go, which is the pitch.
The owners in the thread have had theirs a long time. One painter bought a bar five years ago and has barely made a dent in it. The top reply says the same thing: it lasts you a long time, so it's worth it.
I bought my first Master's soap 20 years ago. It's still saving my brushes. Get the brush soap.
u/artisanDPP, in r/minipainting
Another painter counts it as one of the three extras they'd call essential, with a wet palette and a magnifier.
Somebody who'd just gone through a drawer of old brushes says the soap brought back fifteen or twenty of them in an evening, points and all. A few were sable brushes they'd given up on.
The bluntest reply calls skimping here penny wise and pound foolish. That painter doesn't see dish soap coming out cheaper over the years a pot lasts.
Which brushes need brush soap?
Two of the loudest voices for the pot are sable painters, and a third says sable is where soap starts to matter.
One of them buys a single sable brush a year and moves it down the ranks as it wears: base coats, then priming, then basing. Soap is what makes that cascade work.
Their advice to the thread starter was the sharpest in it: don't get soap if you're using synthetic, get the brush first. A pot costs about the same as one of those brushes.
Another painter who says any soap will work adds that brush shampoo becomes especially useful once you own kolinsky sable.
A third puts it in terms of the hair itself. Natural hair wants a mild conditioner now and then, and artificial hair doesn't, because it has no pores to feed.
If you paint with sable or any natural-hair brush, the thread's answer is to buy the pot. It lasts for years, and the brush it protects costs more than the soap does.
What dish soap does fine
The thread starter's own plan was dish soap, and nobody said it would wreck a cheap synthetic brush.
One painter calls the Masters great but still says they've yet to find anything that Dawn can't clean. Another washed brushes in Fairy dish soap for a while to some effect.
The cheaper options in the thread go further than the washing-up bottle.
- Plain bar soap. One painter used a hotel-size bar for years, with as little perfume as possible, on the grounds that soap is soap for this job. Another recommends an unscented vegetable-oil bar, and rolls the tip back into shape on it at the final rinse.
- Hand soap. Synthetic brushes washed in hand soap keep their form for one painter.
- Isopropyl alcohol. One reply skips soap altogether and cleans with strong isopropyl, the liquid sort of hand sanitiser, because nothing is faster.
- A homemade bar. When the pot was out of stock, one painter read its data sheet. They bought a shampoo bar and a conditioner bar with the same ingredients and melted them together in a silicone mould. They reckon it'll last them decades.
For a handful of cheap synthetics, any of those is a fair bet.
The one firm vote against dish soap is for a different paint. Cool Tools' Ian Holman used dish soap on oil paint, brushes and hands both, and found it didn't do a great job. The artist's soap kept a bargain-bin brush going for a year or more.
It isn't cheap, Holman says, and it leaves a little residue on the towel. For oils, that's the experience to weigh. For acrylics and miniatures, nobody in the thread had the same complaint.
What it won't do
Teoh Yi Chie, who reviews art supplies at Parkablogs, tested the pot on a set of old, worn watercolour brushes and came away measured. It helps preserve a brush and makes it last longer, but it isn't magic and won't bring a really worn brush back to its original point.
One test brush looked sharp after a wash, then went blunt again the first time it was used.
The same review tried the Da Vinci tin next to it and found probably no difference in the soap itself. The metal tin was rusting, though, and the Masters pot is plastic.
Look at what's in your brush jar before you buy anything. Sable or any natural hair, and the Masters pot is the thread's answer, with years in it. Cheap synthetics, and the thread's advice is to keep the dish soap, put the money toward one good brush, and buy the soap for that one.
