Fuumuui Travel Brushes

I’m currently testing travel  brushes🎨 🖌️ , and decided to try out the Chinese company Fuumuui’s lovely squirrel mop set. I usually try to avoid the Chinese products that flood Amazon with cheap knockoffs of established products (although I did really end up liking the Chinese waterbrush set that is in the test in the current Exploration Quarterly!).

But Fuumuui is a 30-year-old manufacturer of artist supplies and pigments that are widely used in Asia and gaining traction in Europe. I ordered the three-piece squirrel-hair travel set, which comes with size 4, 8, and 12 mop brushes, a really useful size range tucked into a leather pouch. Listed for $49USD, they are on sale right now for $32, about the price of one Isabey squirrel mop travel brush which is my longtime standard (and seemingly not available any longer; and even the French Isabey just say “designed” in France now).

I’m really liking the Fuumuui brushes so far; they hold a lot of water with fat bases but taper to really nice points. Only a couple of shed hairs at first, now they are stable. The fat-plus-pointy shape makes them both solid and flexible, which is a nice combination: solid enough to not collapse when you are trying to do detail but flexible enough to do swooshes like tall grass and tree branches. I like the old-school quill ferrule (plastic, not feather quill, but same look). The rosewood-color wood shafts are lovely.

Another unique feature that surprised me is that the cap attaches by screw-mount; this is a surprising improvement on just slide-on. It’s very secure. The caps also have air holes in the end. The smallest brush is 4.25” closed, the largest is 5.1 inches.

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Next up I’m going to try Rosemary & Co. travel brushes. I’ll be visiting their factory in England this autumn. We’ll publish a full test and review of travel brushes in a future issue of Exploration Quarterly.