13 best hair brushes for painless detangling and silky smooth strands in 2025

My frizzy, wavy, thick hair met its match with this Ziggy brush’s patented zigzag head design. The pronged approach effectively recreates the feeling of brushing your fingers through your hair. Each pin flexes independently, reducing the pressure and force often encountered during the detangling process. As for the bristles themselves, the Ziggy brush boasts soft flexi pins with micro ball tips that are incredibly gentle on the head. This means there’s zero risk of scratching, snagging or irritating your scalp or hair, leading to a much gentler brushing experience.

I tend to have particularly knotty hair post-wash, but the brush made light work of detangling, and I was comfortable the entire time.

After a long day in the office, the brush helped smooth flyaways and, while I usually avoid brushing out my hair between washes, the Ziggy design minimised the frizzed finish I dread.

The soft pins glide through your hair, and the vented head increases air flow to prevent any heat build-up that could exacerbate frizz. My only gripe is that the brush is a cumbersome shape to use while blow-drying (a smaller, more rounded brush works better).

Overall, this brush is a triple threat for detangling, smoothing and reducing frizz. I also love the fact that it’s made using 100 per cent recycled materials.

This brush is designed to minimise breakage with a wide-set arrangement of bristles. It features two types of bristles – the longer ones work through knots while the shorter ones help smooth strands – plus a densely packed bristle section in the centre to ensure a thorough detangle. While this all sounds promising, I didn’t find it ideal for detangling dry hair and noticed it caused some stress on my knottier strands.

However, when combing conditioner through wet hair, the ultimate detangler’s wide-set teeth made it much easier to settle the brush into my strands and distribute the product evenly. Although I have fine to medium hair, I imagine using this brush in the shower would work well for thicker hair too.

It can be hard to find a decent travel brush, but this on-the-go option is a great choice. The hair brush has bristles of three different lengths to latch onto tangles near the scalp, mid-lengths and ends. As someone with hair prone to matting, this brush was relatively pain-free to use and the least irritating of the mini models I tested.

In an ideal world, you wouldn’t use this brush every day, but it makes an excellent pick if you’re travelling with hand luggage only or need to tidy up on the way to work. In fact, this brush is sitting at the bottom of my work bag as I type this review.

Mason Pearson’s boar bristle hair brushes have been around for more than a century, so it’d be fair to say the brand knows a thing or two about haircare. This popular brush features a blend of nylon and boar bristles to detangle and smooth. One of the key draws is the flexible rubber pad that enables the bristles to contour to the shape of your head, massaging the scalp and promoting natural oil release. It handled tangles without tugging, and, as someone who struggles with dry ends, I found it smoothed flyaways and breakage, minimising the appearance of dryness in the process.

However, it isn’t perfect. It doesn’t cater to textured hair, our curly-haired tester wouldn’t recommend it unless you want brushed-out curls. While it works well, it’s laughably expensive, nearly ten times more expensive than our top pick.

Cantu’s new curl definer brush combines boar and plastic bristles with long afro comb spokes to smooth, detangle, and define curls. It’s crafted from repurposed wheat straw and has a non-slip grip.

Our tester Fionola has 3C/4A curls, and she found the suggested method of ‘comb, brush-twist-comb (one motion), scrunch’ made detangling her hair easy, even after a week of no brushing. She found using the brush and comb together a breeze and, together with a leave-in conditioner, noticed her curls appeared tight, defined and glossy after use. Fionola found a little frizz as the curls set and dried, but on the whole, they maintained their coily shape and gorgeous sheen.

If you’re one for an updo, this brush needs to be on your wishlist. It’s perfect for tackling flyaways, so it’s perfect for a ‘that girl’ slick-back. Its large surface area means that it can grip onto large chunks of hair with ease. I found that it’s easy to use when blow-drying and styling, but it’s worth noting that nylon can melt, so don’t overdo it with high heat around the bristles.

I love how the mirror-shine design looks on my dressing table, and was seriously in awe of how soft the dual bristle types made my tangle-prone hair. The brush made relatively quick work of tangles, too, though I found it a little harsh on my scalp.

I asked a tester with curls ranging from 2C to 3C to put this brush through its paces, and she found it did an amazing job of keeping her curls defined while boosting volume, especially around the roots. She was also impressed with how the brush left her curls super shiny and soft to the touch.

While the brush’s narrow side teeth separate curls and edges, encouraging natural volume and height, the broader top teeth are great for clumping fringes and short strands. The flexible, round-tipped bristles are designed to tackle tangles while reducing breakage, and the vegan-friendly boar-style bristles help to smooth and reduce frizz. We found that if you tilt the brush at the roots, your hair falls into the grooves, separating and creating the ultimate curl definition as you brush it through.

However, the brush isn’t designed for heavy detangling, and it struggled with large chunks of particularly knotty hair, so be sure to section hair into smaller clumps when using this brush.

One of IndyBest’s curly-haired reviewers uses a lot of hair creams and serums, and this brush is the one she looks to for an even distribution of product. The strong nylon bristles ensure every single strand gets the same amount of love, while the even spacing of the bristles encourages optimum strand separation and defined curls.

This brush can be used on wet and dry hair, whether a simple comb or the three-step curly girl method – all you’ll need to do is twist and wrap strands around the brush’s handle as you work from root to tip, before gently unwinding. However, those with sensitive scalps or fragile or damaged hair may find this brush a little too harsh.

Paddle brushes have a bad reputation. The squishy, air-filled base can trap water when used on wet hair, which can lead to mould and mildew.

However, Aveda has solved this issue with a simple adjustment: a single missing bristle to aid ventilation beneath the rubber cushion. This same rubber cushion helps to curve the bristles to the shape of your scalp and, in theory, aims to provide a thorough root-to-tip detangle.

While it can work through every knot and snarl, it’s not the gentlest at unravelling. If you’re prone to matts or ‘bed head’ in the morning, I don’t recommend this brush. However, it’s an excellent scalp massager, and the wide spacing of the bristles means you can slot a hair dryer concentrator nozzle between them to help flatten flyaways. When blow-drying, I found the bristles were sturdy even when using the highest heat setting and, thanks to the bristles’ length, they gripped onto large sections of hair for a speedier dry.

As someone who struggles to create a smooth and seamless slick-back, this brush was a welcome addition to my styling arsenal. Though you’ll need a heftier brush to pull most of the hair away from your face, this narrow dressing brush makes it easy to slick down pesky lumps, bumps and flyaways.

If you have hairspray, gel or mousse handy, the brush’s natural bristles will distribute the product well, helping to create straighter strands. An extra row or two of bristles might have aided the brush’s grip on my somewhat slippery hair. On the whole, I enjoyed using it to volumise and found it easy to section hair using the tapered handle.

This static-free round brush will be a welcome tool for anyone sporting a ‘Rachel’, a textured pixie (think: Princess Diana), a flicked-out bob or a bell-bottom bob. The brush is lightweight and uses flexible ball-tipped bristles to minimise tugging and tangles, and the smaller circumference makes it easier to create a lasting hold while curling fringe pieces.

In terms of breakage, the spindly pins felt gentler than boar or natural bristles, which are often used in round brushes. The Cricket brush glided through my hair without putting pressure on the roots, but that meant it was harder to grip onto the hair. It won’t work for long hair, and I wouldn’t recommend it for creating texture in dense hair, but fine to medium thicknesses shouldn’t have a problem.

Manta hair brushes found fame after an appearance on Dragons’ Den last year. This flexible, finger-grip design aims to minimise breakage. Created by Tim Binnington for his wife, who was regrowing her hair after a life-threatening illness, Manta was designed to mimic the feeling of running fingers through hair. Its patented bristles offer 360-degree motion, enabling them to flex and move with the hair, to reduce stress on the shaft.

Unfortunately, from a dry detangling point of view, the Manta didn’t compare to a traditional rigid brush during testing. Granted, this brush didn’t cause any tugs or tears, but it didn’t tackle the knots, either. The brush felt more at home on wet hair and proved a handy in-shower tool to work my conditioner through my strands.

The Manta pulse’s massage function was a highlight. With two speed settings (2,000 or 4,000 pulsations per minute), it delivers a relaxing, salon-style experience that claims to exfoliate the scalp and relieve tension. I found it especially soothing after wearing my hair up all day, and the vibrations eased tightness around my crown and hairline. While I won’t be retiring my paddle brush just yet, the pulse has earned a place in my shower and scalp care routine.

If you like to use your hair dryer to flatten down flyaways, Ceremonia’s brush de pelo will be your saving grace. Crafted from bamboo, this eco-conscious brush features evenly spaced ball-tip bristles that cradle a blow-dryer concentrator nozzle.

While the length of the bristles means you can tackle a large amount of hair in one pass, their sturdiness also means this brush is a little uncomfortable. That’s not to say that the brush can’t detangle – it definitely can – but it’s a little more uncomfortable than the Ziggy and Mason Pearson brushes above.

The brand claims that its bristles help to “remove impurities and distribute the hair's natural oils.” While it’s hard to ascertain whether this is true, I found that the ball tips worked to relieve tension around the crown of my head after an updo.

There’s no drainage puncture as with Aveda’s paddle brush, so I wouldn’t use it in-shower or on sopping wet hair. This probably also rules it out for curly types who only style water or product-saturated hair.