Synthetic Hair for this item, but natural badger customization is available.
Pure badger
Pure badger are badger hair brushes that use the most common hair from the underbelly of a badger, the hair which covers around 60% of a badger's body. This hair varies greatly in softness, pliability and color. Pure badger hair is usually dark in color, but fluctuates from a light tan to a near-black or silvery sheen. The hair is coarser than 'best' or 'silvertip' hair due to its larger shaft. Brushes made exclusively with pure badger hair cost significantly less than finer badger hair. Most often, pure badger brush hairs are trimmed to shape, resulting in somewhat stiff, rough ends.
Best badger
Best badger are brushes made with the finer and more pliable hairs from 20 - 25% of the badger's body. It is longer in length and lighter in color than 'pure' badger hair. A 'best' badger brush is more densely filled with hair than the 'pure' badger brush and will produce a correspondingly greater lather. However, some wet shavers argue that the variance between the quality of a 'pure' and a 'best' badger brush is negligible. Best badger and better quality brush hairs are often fit so that the ends do not have to be cut to shape.
Super badger
A super badger brush is more expensive than either 'best' or 'pure'. While some call this hair 'silvertip', it is often highly
graded 'pure' hair bleached on the ends to resemble silvertip. Though it is composed of 'pure' badger hairs, 'super' is graded and sorted to such a degree that its performance is superior to that of 'best'. The brush is not prickly.
One way to determine if a brush bears a 'super' or 'silvertip' badger hair load is to look at the color of the bristle tips. A
true 'silvertip' brush has tips that are an off-white. A 'super' brush on the other hand has bristle tips that are a more sterile,
slightly greyed white; moreover, the light color of the tips does not extend as far down the shaft of the hair.
Silvertip badger
A silvertip badger hair brush, Silvertip badger is the most expensive and rare type of badger hair. The tips on this hair appear white naturally, without bleaching. A "flared" bristle load results in the 'silvertip' brush's fluffy appearance and lends the brush its ability to hold a large amount of water. Due to its water retention capacity, a 'silvertip' brush can create well-formed shaving lather quickly and easily.
Some manufacturers sell shaving brushes in a grade beyond silvertip. While the names these companies give this 'extra silvertip' vary, the properties remain fairly consistent between manufacturers as compared to the 'ordinary silvertip' brush. These brushes differ in appearance (the tip is whiter and extends further down the shaft; additionally, the hair under the tip is pure black as opposed to dark grey in color) and feel (the extra silvertip feels slightly firmer and less "prickly" on the face when lathering).
Another feature that badger bristles may show are the so called “gel tips”, a combination of two distinct traits: a little “hook” in many hair tips and a gel, slick sensation of the knot tips when wet. When dry, the shaving brush knots with gel tips are not fully recognizable: the presence of little hooks is not sufficient to provide the second, and also most distinct trait: the “slick”, soapy feeling. The feeling of gel tips can be discerned pretty easily: once wet, the hair tips clump together in little groups and after lathering up, it will seems that the soap in the knot can’t be fully rinsed away. There’s no standard for this feature, so every person will have to feel it himself, especially when rubbing the wet shaving brush knot near the lips, where the skin is more sensitive.