Alaina Urquhart

They were like camel hair brushes and they had to be capable of doing the finest details.

So one painter said, I had never seen a brush as fine as that.

I would say it possibly had about 30 hairs in it.

It was exceptionally fine.

Because the consequences of an error could be very costly to the company, you know, accuracy and consistency in these little tiny details was very, very, very important.

The brushes were delicate and slim for sure, as we hear, but the bristles would like spread out after a while, like any brush, you know, they just get worn.

Exactly, because you're really doing this as fast as you can.

That was going to make mistakes happen.

So what Schaub said was, we put the brushes in our mouths.

Because that was a technique they had made up called lip pointing.

And it was passed down from the earliest dial painters who were themselves hired away from their previous jobs as painters of China dolls.

So they could do those fine details.

Lip pointing was when the painter would wet the bristles of the brush with their lips or their tongue.

Oh, God.

Pressing those bristles together to make that fine tip like we would with like a regular brush.

You know, like you just to get it really thin.

No.

The girls, totally unbeknownst to them, while lip pointing was the standard practice in the U.S., it was not that way in Europe.

In fact, European manufacturers had completely abandoned brushes altogether because they ended up using like implements that would hold that fine point so they wouldn't have to do that.

Okay.