When Natural Isn't Necessarily Better

August 22, 2026

My dad, a battered shaving brush, a badger — and why SISU sometimes chooses synthetic.

My dad always shaved with a brush and shaving soap.

Not because it was fashionable, nostalgic or something he'd seen on Instagram. It was just how you shaved.

I can still picture his favourite shaving brush. By the time I remember it, the poor thing had bristles pointing in practically every direction. He wasn't exactly delicate when it came to working up a lather.

He maintained that it was made from pig or horse hair. And, as it turns out, he may very well have been right.

He also maintained that a brush, soap and razor beat an electric shaver hands down. According to him, electric shavers pulled at his skin and left it dry.

Then came the aftershave.

Apparently, the sting of aftershave hitting a freshly shaved face was part of the pleasure.

Men are strange.

Even stranger, the man never moisturised and had better skin than I do.

But that old brush got me thinking.

Because this week we're featuring Simply Bee's Men's Shaving Brush — and the bristles are synthetic.

Now SISU spends an awful lot of time talking about natural ingredients, beeswax, honey, rooibos, locally made products and things made more like they used to be.

So why synthetic?

Because perhaps we've been asking the wrong question.

Natural isn't automatically good. Synthetic isn't automatically bad.

A shaving brush made from animal hair sounds wonderfully traditional. Wood, soap, bristles — what's not to like?

Quite a lot, depending on where those bristles came from.

Badger hair became one of the traditional favourites for shaving brushes for good practical reasons. It works beautifully with water and shaving soap and can produce the dense, creamy lather wet-shaving enthusiasts love.

The problem isn't the badger's ability to make a good shaving brush.

The problem is the badger.

Unlike wool from a sheep that can be shorn and carry on being a sheep, badger hair isn't generally something we're collecting after Mr Badger pops into the barber for his annual trim. Investigations of the commercial trade have documented badgers being captured or bred, confined and killed for their hair.

Suddenly, "100% natural badger hair" doesn't sound quite as wholesome.

But what about pig and horse hair?

This is where it gets more interesting, because not all animal fibres are equal either.

Horsehair can be harvested without killing the horse, particularly when sourced from mane and tail grooming. That potentially puts responsibly sourced horsehair into a very different ethical category from badger hair.

Boar or pig bristle is another traditional brush material, but its provenance needs more scrutiny. It is commonly associated with the pork industry, meaning the animal is generally not being kept alive and periodically "harvested" for its bristles. So describing something as natural boar bristle tells us what it's made from — not whether it was ethically produced.

And that's really the point.

When synthetic is the better choice

There are times when making something in a laboratory or factory isn't trying to improve on nature.

It's trying to leave nature alone.

A good modern synthetic shaving brush can be soft, springy, quick-drying and consistent. It doesn't require an animal to supply the bristles, and it avoids some of the sourcing questions surrounding animal hair.

That's why the synthetic bristles on the Simply Bee brush don't bother us.

In fact, they're one of the reasons we like it.

Because SISU's idea of "natural" was never supposed to mean blindly choosing whatever grew on, came out of, or once belonged to an animal.

It's about asking better questions.