Like I mentioned in the BBA Insta, some people got bae. I got me. And for Valentine’s Day, I decided to treat myself to a 5-piece Artis brush set because I wanted to see what the hype was all about.

Price aside, the biggest appeal of any Artis brush is the soft bristle. This thing is supposed to be straight-from-heaven soft. My set arrived today and I popped one out to finally see what the fuss is all about.

I’m not too impressed. I was expecting the brush softness to be something to write home about. Nope. Some of my other cheaper brushes (and by cheaper, they all count as cheap compared to how much one of the brushes in the set would have cost) have softer bristles than the Artis. So what gives?

Then, an “aha!” moment: the bristles are densely packed – they are bunched up together so tightly that you can hardly see any space between each bristle hair. So maybe that’s why it wasn’t as soft as I was expecting it to be?

Or maybe the other lines from Artis have that straight-from-heaven brush softness that I’m expecting?