Best Affordable Makeup Brushes

See the updated version here!

Note: I considered breaking this down into a Tip Tuesday and Recommendation Thursday, but ultimately decided it would be more trouble than it was worth to try and separate them in a way that still made them make sense.  As a result, this post is really long (and it took me so many hours to write, I don't even want to think about it), but I've tried to organize it in such a way that you can find specific parts easily and skip what doesn't interest you.  I'll be including reviews for the brushes in my collection under their respective categories, so keep an eye out for those.

My makeup brush collection is frighteningly large.  They all fit in a coffee mug (because I'm too cheap to buy an actual brush holder, duh), but only barely!  I've been amassing my collection over the past few years, and have finally decided to post about them so you can hopefully learn from my experience (and I from yours!).  This brush is dedicated to L, whose prompting inspired me to actually get around to a) washing and b) photographing my brushes, neither of which is very labor-intensive, but I'm just so lazy I'd never gotten around to it.

Okay, crash course on why makeup brushes matter: Using quality tools to apply your makeup will ensure you get the most out of your products, or, put more accurately, using bad brushes will make even the nicest makeup look and behave like crap.  Regardless of whether you use high- or low-end cosmetics, you want to get the most out of your collection, and good brushes are a vital part of that.

So, what makes a brush good?