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Shoe Care Guide

How to Clean Shoe Polishing Brush

Shoe shine brushes don’t require much maintenance, but as you use them the residual polish will accumulate on the bristle and therefore require cleaning. Cleaning your shoeshine brush is a very straightforward process that only requires a clean cotton chamois or towel. Simply buff the shoe shine brush briskly across the cotton chamois to remove any excess polish and that’s really all there is to it.

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Transcription

Hi, I'm Kirby Allison, founder of The Hanger Project and we love helping the well-dressed take care of their wardrobes. In todays video I'm going to show you how to clean your shoe shine brush. Now a frequently asked question that we received often here at The Hanger Project is what do I need to do to keep my shoe shine brushes clean? The short answer is that shoeshine brushes don't require much maintenance but as you use them residual polish will accumulate on the bristle.

So, I have a shoe shine brush that I use to brush a navy pair of shoes and as you can see this is a perfect illustration of the amount of polish it'll accumulate on a brush just after one polishing. This is another great example on why we generally recommend having two different shoe shine brushes; one with dark bristle and one with light bristle. The reason being is that you want to use your dark bristle brush on just your darker polishes and keep that separate from the brush you use on your light browns and browns.

The reason is is that the residual dark polishes that accumulate on the bristle can actually streak a lighter pair of shoes so it's good to keep those brushes separately. With that said as that residual polish develops it's good every once in a while to try to clean that residual polish off the brush and the way that we recommend doing that here at The Hanger Project is simply taking your horse hair brush and just buffing the bristle across a clean chamois or a towel. And as you can see that residual polish will wipe off.

Now rotate your brush and do the same thing brushing in the other direction and that just assures that you're getting as much of that residual polish off the brush as possible. If you can do this at the end of each time you use your shoe shine brush, it's just going to help to keep your brushes extra clean and to prevent the risk of any residual polish streaking any pairs of shoes the next time you use it.

You don't really need to do much more than that. I wouldn't wash your brushes under water or shampoo them any way, because you want to really keep the natural texture of that horse hair intact. If you want to learn more about our entire collection of shoe shine brushes and what makes them different, we have a shoe shine brush overview video on our YouTube channel.

As always let us know what you think with comments below, I always get back to those myself personally. If you like this video please give us a thumbs up or better yet subscribe to our channel. I'm Kirby Allison founder of The Hanger project. Thanks for joining us.