Mason Pearson

Mason Pearson is a British hairbrush manufacturer founded in 1885 and still run as an independent, family-owned business by the Pearson family in London [7]. It is best known for the pneumatic rubber-cushion hairbrush, a hand-finished tool made largely from boar bristle that has changed little since the original design and is regularly handed down within families.

The company remains active. Each brush is still made in England, at a factory in Rainham in eastern London, and in 2024 Mason Pearson extended beyond brushes for the first time with a small haircare line, the year before marking its 140th anniversary in 2025.

The firm traces back to Mason Pearson, an engineer and inventor who began his career designing wool-processing looms in Bradford before moving to London, where he worked at the British Steam Brush Works. Drawing on that background, he built an automatic brush-boring machine, and in 1885 he won a Silver Medal for it at the International Inventions Exhibition in London. In the same year he extended the idea into the "pneumatic" rubber-cushion hairbrush that became the company's primary product [2].

After Pearson died in 1906, the business was continued by his widow and son and became known as Mason Pearson Brothers — a name the brand itself notes is "somewhat of a misnomer," since the founder's daughters were heavily involved, one of them managing factory operations for some fifty years [7]. By the 1920s the core product and its model names were essentially settled, and the brush has been made along the same lines ever since.

The founder's rubber-cushion technique was patented in 1911 [3]. The relationship with the brand's boar-bristle suppliers dates to 1941, and the long-lasting plastic handles in use today were introduced in 1946. The factory moved from Old Ford Road to Stratford in 1986, and relocated again to Rainham in 2009. In 2024 the company launched its first haircare range, a six-piece collection of shampoos, conditioners, a leave-in conditioner and a serum intended to work alongside the brushes.

Mason Pearson is family-owned and independent, with no parent company; it is currently run by the Pearson family from London [7]. Wikipedia records that the business "is still passed down through generations." No acquisitions are recorded.

The company positions the brushes as long-term, even heirloom, purchases, and frames their durability as a form of sustainability — it says it has "always been committed to building hairbrushes that really last," calling this its longstanding "mantra." According to Mason Pearson, quality "shouldn't be rushed," and each brush passes through 18 stages of production, including six finishing stages in which the handle is hand-polished and hand-embossed with gold foil. The firm states plainly that "we do not believe in short cuts." It describes its core values as loyalty, luxury and efficacy [3], and trades under the line "Feel the Difference."

The brand has deliberately avoided limited-edition colours and shapes in favour of a timeless, functional design; it even reports using specially formulated inks to match the authenticity of its 1920s packaging.

The signature product is the pneumatic rubber-cushion hairbrush, built around a hand-made rubber pad and bristles of boar hair, nylon, or a bristle-and-nylon mix. The range is organised by size and use — large, medium, handy, military and pocket brushes, named with long-standing variants such as Extra, Junior, Popular and Sensitive — alongside a set of hand-made combs. The boar bristles are hand-sorted to remove any that fail to meet the colour and quality expected, then graded by thickness and stiffness [3]. The brushes are presented as tools to promote smoother, healthier-looking and more manageable hair by helping distribute the hair's natural oils. The 2024 haircare line, described by the company as a "capsule collection," is its first move beyond the brushes themselves.

Manufacturing is carried out entirely in England, at the Rainham site, which employs more than 60 people. The brushes are sold through a mix of direct retailers, salons, distributors and specialist stores including department stores and perfumeries across more than two dozen countries on four continents — among them Denmark, Norway and Sweden — while the company states it does not endorse sales through marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay [5].

Beyond the 1885 Silver Medal, the brushes have a long-running reputation as a premium, "investment" object, and in recent years have found a new audience online. A 2025 PureWow feature reported that the classic large boar-bristle brush had gone viral on TikTok, where it is nicknamed "The Rolls Royce of Hairbrushes," noting that "while the company dates back to the 1880s, its most ardent fans are presently Gen Zers" [8]. The piece cited owners who had kept the same brush for 25 years or more, while also questioning whether a roughly $375 brush would outperform a cheaper drugstore one. A Twentyseven Toronto editorial similarly described Mason Pearson as a brand that "has rightfully earned its cult status," and noted it is often chosen by people with thicker, wavier, curlier or more frizz-prone hair [9].

Mason Pearson is active. It is an independent, family-run British manufacturer that has operated continuously since 1885, still makes its products in London, and added a haircare line as recently as 2024 with editorial and social-media attention continuing through 2025 [8].

The company gives 1885 as its founding year, anchored to the invention of the pneumatic rubber-cushion hairbrush and the Silver Medal of that same year; the "140 years" cited on its homepage points to the same date, and Wikipedia agrees that "in 1885 he invented the 'pneumatic' rubber-cushion hairbrush" [2][7]. One editorial source dates the firm more loosely to "the late 1800s" and places the patent in "the early 1900s," which aligns with the brand's own patent year of 1911 — the patent being distinct from the 1885 invention rather than a competing founding date [3][9].