Building and maintaining a decent makeup brush collection can be a rather costly endeavor. It can also be a rather drawn out process of buying and buying and buying until you find brushes that you are completely happy with. I have around 15 eye shadow brushes, but I only use 3 different ones. One I use for all over and transition colors, one I use for the crease and outer V, and the third I use for blending. Since two of those brushes have to pull double color duty, I had to get a towel and spend several minutes rubbing the brushes back and forth until I got the color out of them. I found myself lamenting having brushes with excellent color pick up. My eye shadow application time was triple what it should have been.