Mason Pearson Pneumatic Hairbrush

The Mason Pearson brush is recognised from across a room: an oval back in dark ruby or ivory, and in place of a flat bed of bristle a domed rubber pad pierced with tufts. The pad is the invention. Air trapped beneath the cushion lets each tuft give as it meets the scalp, so the brush follows the curve of the head rather than raking across it, and the tufts, boar bristle or a mix of bristle and nylon, carry the hair's own oil from root to tip.

Mason Pearson came to it from engineering. A Yorkshireman, he had designed looms for the Bradford wool trade before moving to London in the 1860s to work at the British Steam Brush Works in the East End, where brushes were still bored and filled by hand. He built a machine to bore them automatically, which won a silver medal at the International Inventions Exhibition in South Kensington in 1885, and the same year turned to the hairbrush itself. The cushion took him two decades to perfect; by 1905 the method was settled, though much of it still had to be done by hand.

He died the following year. His widow Mary ran the business with their eldest son for another twenty years, under the name Mason Pearson Brothers, and the firm has passed down the family since. It stayed on Old Ford Road in the East End for more than a century before moving to Stratford in 1986.

The brushes are still made in London and are not mass-produced. Each passes through eighteen stages, six of them in finishing alone, with the handle polished by hand again and again and the name embossed in gold foil. The sizes have barely moved in a century, Large Extra, Small Extra, Popular and Junior, and the cushion is still made by hand to Pearson's method. That is why it costs what it does.