If you’re in the market for make up brushes and you don’t already own and love one of the pieces from Real Techniques range of brushes then you must have been living under a life eclipsing rock that needs to be removed immediately. Before Real Techniques I’ll admit that I had one or two “proper” brushes in my collection and the rest were odd jobs from eBay and those okayish sets from a Boots 3 for 2 set at Christmas one year. There were no MAC 217s or Sigma brushes in my oh-so-hip-it-hurts mason jar of brushes and I’d guffaw at girls who spent entire Sundays washing their collection of brushes when I had 3 or 4 to my name that  doubled up as blusher, highlight, contour and powder all in one.

That was until the MUA and YouTube beauty powerhouses Pixiwoo (also known as Samantha Chapman and Nicola Haste) teamed up with the American beauty company in 2011 to bring quality, affordable and professional tools designed with women with a love of make up and MUAs alike in mind. With beauty blogs and How To videos ever increasing in popularity, it was about time that affordable brushes were readily available for a mass market and the exceptional quality of the Real Techniques Brushes more than filled the void.

Fast forward a couple of years and the core range, made up 3 brush categories, each easily identifiable by the different coloured ferrules: base, face and eye (base brushes (orange ferrule) such as stippling, foundation and buffing brushes, face brushes (pink ferrule) such as powder and blush brushes and eye brushes (purple ferrule) such as shading and silicone liner brush) is as popular as ever. As well as the core collections, Real Techniques recently added the Bold Metals Collection to the collection (a luxury range of brushes featuring metallic handles in gold, silver and rose gold) as well as releasing a number of limited edition sets such as the Duo Fibre Set and Nic’s Picks.

To the limited edition collectors set comes the contour queens dream that is the Real Techniques Sculpting Set available exclusively to Superdrug (you can pick it up online or instore). In the set you get 3 high shine pink brushes: Real Techniques Sculpting Brush, Real Techniques Fan Brush (EXCLUSIVE), Real Techniques Setting Brush which with their £20.99 price tag works out at £7.00 a brush – when the single brushes range from £5.99 to £10+ they’re a contouring bargain.

The Real Techniques Sculpting Brush is a wide, dense angled brush specifically designed to achieve Malificent-esque contour and works well with both powder and liquid contouring products. If you’re a fan of using creams or foundations to sculpt and shape your face, this brush is reminiscent of the Expert Face Brush from the Base collection and can be used to buff cream products into the skin for a flawless and seamless finish (ain’t nobody got time for tiger stripe tell tale contour signs).

The only exclusive brush to the collection (the Sculpting Brush and Setting Brush can be bought in other sets) the Real Techniques Fan Brush is designed to softly sweep on powders, remove excess makeup and for a feather light hand for the most pigmented of products. After watching a contouring tutorial from beauty YouTuber coffee pls where she contoured using as fan brush with the NYX blusher in Taupe (review coming soon) I’ve been after a fan brush to try and replicate her look – so you can imagine how excited I was to see a Real Techniques set featuring one.

Last but not least is the Real Techniques Setting Brush which is a soft fluffy brush ideal for powdering under the eye area, around the nose or even for a controlled dusting of highlighter, especially now that strobing is such big news!

The Real Technique Brush Sets offer amazing value for money for the quality and the range covering all possible make up brush bases means theres no viable reason why your brush collection can’t be made up entirely of a rainbow of Real Techniques brushes.