When involved in basic personal grooming, many people don’t give much thought to the tools they use. They simply grab the tool they need at the moment without considering those elements that make it the perfect tool for the task. However, imagine an alien race came to earth and began asking questions about why some of the things on the vanity table are there, particularly when they seem to serve the same function. Although the comb and the brush are both tools used to straighten the hair on a human’s head, they are each used for different reasons making it very likely that they will be found together.
The comb and the brush have many characteristics in common. This begins with their primary function of tidying the appearance of human hair. Both tools are intended to be held in the hand and, so far, neither has been equipped with an ‘automatic’ function that reduces the human’s need to move. Both the comb and the brush consist of a unifying substructure of some kind from which small, stick-like appendages protrude in some form of pattern. These patterns can vary depending on the specific tool as some combs contain a very fine mesh of these appendages and others are very open. The same can be said of brushes. In both cases, the difference in pattern is designed to provide the user with different effects in the styling of their hair or to work in greater harmony with the texture of their hair. In addition, the materials these tools are made of can be very different, ranging from hard plastics to natural fibers and these will again produce different results.
Although brushes and combs come in vastly different shapes, sizes, colors, patterns, etc., there are some specific characteristics of each of these tools that mark them as specifically a comb or a brush. This begins with the words used to describe them. While the comb may be ‘fine-toothed’ or have a wide enough pattern to be called a ‘pick’, the brush always has bristles whether they are widely spaced or closely packed. The comb is limited in its shape to a relatively flat design with all of the teeth facing the same direction and lined up neatly in a row along the spine. The brush, however, has discovered a very wide range of shapes from almost flat to completely round. Although the teeth on the comb must be largely inflexible, brushes can range from very soft animal-hair bristles to very hard steel ones. Each of these differences produce different effects on the hair being treated as already mentioned, but again brushes and combs are used for different reasons as well. Combs are intended to help the user sort out their hair to a very fine degree when needed or to simply move strands of hair to their appropriate place on the head. They are used for fine precision in hair-styling. Brushes, on the other hand, are used as a less painful means of sorting out the greatest of the tangles in long hair, to quickly tidy blown hair or to more freely distribute natural oils produced by the body along the strands of hair to keep them healthier longer.
There are so many different styles and shapes of combs and brushes that it might be difficult for an alien to recognize them all as being within the same tool classification, but there are some similarities between the tools used to style hair that can help with identification and some differences that will help with classification. Both tools have similar functions and are intended for the same feature of the body and both have a variety of shapes intended to match the needs of its user, but they are not the same. Combs are generally flat with a single line of teeth intended for fine styling while brushes come in many different shapes with numerous bristle patterns that are used for more general styling and for overall hair health.