Читать книгу Pretty Iconic: A Personal Look at the Beauty Products that Changed the World - Sali Hughes - Страница 29

Any company awarded a Royal Warrant – a recognition of excellence for selected small firms that supply the royal households – must be doing something right. A firm granted Royal Warrants by nine successive sovereigns, though, can claim quite persuasively to be doing pretty much everything better than anyone else. Founded in 1777, the brush-making concern G.B. Kent & Sons was awarded its first warrant by George III and has received royal thumbs-up from every king and queen since. Kent, the UK’s longest established brush-maker, is a heart-swelling example of a firm peopled by artisans, preserving specialist skills in the face of mass production and foreign imports.

Kent allies British pluck and ingenuity – the Second World War saw the firm produce a shaving brush with a secret compartment for map and compass to facilitate the escape of prisoners of war – with meticulous production methods to produce doughty, tactile artefacts of enduring loveliness. Its saw-cut combs are polished and buffed by hand, the teeth free of the tiny, snaggy ridges found in injection-moulded combs. The women’s tail comb – a seventies classic that sells a pleasingly un-mass-market forty a day – is a sleek, frictionless delight that makes you want to keep on combing, mermaid-like, long after the practical necessity has gone. I like to imagine Princess Anne using one to tease her crown before sweeping everything into a no-nonsense riding bun, or Charles reaching for his Kent brush in the hope of making his remaining strands go further.

If sharing a brush supplier with the Queen doesn’t float your royal yacht – and I do understand – focus instead on the preciousness of British-made beauty tools, made with love, pride and devotion to the craft, and sold widely at a very reasonable and accessible price point (my paternal grandfather always carried a tortoiseshell Kent – and he was a lowly stable lad). Kent is a company I wish to exist for ever. We should never assume that’s a given, and perhaps replace our old combs forthwith.