Good paint brushes will provide excellent service for years, that is, if they’re properly taken care of. Proper cleaning and wrapping of a brush is an essential part of making sure that it will be usable for the next several years; but not everyone cleans their brushes properly.
Granted, having to stop basking in the joy of just having finished an interior decorating project, to clean your brushes isn't exactly something to bring joy to the heart. Many people put off cleaning their brushes but unfortunately, the longer you put it off, the harder those brushes are to clean. Leave them sitting long enough and they hard as a rock.
Modern acrylic/latex paints are much easier to clean out of paint brushes than oil-based paints are. All that's required most of the time is some warm water and a little bit of dish soap. But if the brush has been dipped too far into the paint, allowed to sit with paint in it or used in a hot environment where paint hardens quickly, they can be extremely hard to clean. In those cases, a brush cleaner may be needed.
The problem isn't usually the paint that's on the ends of the bristles or even the paint which hardens on the outside of them. Rather, it's the paint that works its way up into the center of the bristles, close to the ferrule that holds the bristles and handle together. When this paint hardens, it eliminates the bristles' flexibility making it very easy for them to break.
Even brushes with paint hardened up close to the ferrule can be salvaged, if one has the patience to work with them. Brush cleaners will soften that paint, allowing it to be cleaned out. Since the bristles are packed so close together, cleaning out that softened paint takes time, working them with a brush comb. As the brush comb pulls out the softened paint, the bristles will become more pliable. Once all the paint is pulled out (which takes quite a bit of work) the bristles can be cleaned with soap and warm water to remove the chemical cleaner.
Not all chemical cleaners are created equal. Some clearly work better than others and some are limited in the types of paint they will work with. It's important to know what type of paint the brush has in it, before selecting a cleaner. Professional painters use different types of brushes for different types of paint, so this identification is easy for them. Most homeowners attempt to use the same type of brush for everything, so you'll have to look at the paint can labels to find out what type of paint you used.
After cleaning any paint brush, it should be wrapped in the original wrapper, so that it can maintain a good shape. High quality brushes come with wrappers which are designed to be reusable for this very reason. If you don't have the original wrapper, you can wrap them instead in newspapers, being careful to shape the bristles correctly to form a nice wedge.
For more information on what to look at in selecting the best brush cleaner in 2022, We have listed below the brush cleaner available for you to help you decide what product is best to buy.