Put a goat on it

Well hello there gorgeous, aren't you looking lovely today. What? No of course I'm not just complementing you to get you to read me more - you're a stone cold fox, you know that.

Anyway, enough about our petty arguments, there are some real issues to be discussed here and some of them even involve goats and whether or not a modern lady should feel comfortable rubbing them on her eyelids. Others of them involve cucumbers and natural yogurt, or maybe that was my lunch, who can really be sure. But I digress...

I have been feeling a tad morally unsure of late, ever since I was given a bonus gift at Priceline of an Australis Eye Shadow Brush Set. As I perused the list of materials I found that two out of the three brushes in the set contain none other than - goat's hair. Now here comes the part of the conundrum that I'm not quite sure about...wait for it...is this weird/creepy/gross/unethical, in a nut shell - should I be concerned?

Here's a picture of the brushes for your observation:

and another after they had successfully escaped from their plastic and cardboard prison (from left - angle brush, fluffy eye shadow brush, large fluffy brush):

So in order to put my concerns in a biscuit tin and toss them off a bridge (or in other words, get rid of them) I had a bit of a search around on the old netty net to find out what most makeup brushes are really made of. Because in all seriousness, what had I thought I'd been sweeping all over my mug? Leprechaun eyelashes?

I found quite a good run down here which informed me that the most common material used for makeup brushes IS goat hair which is medium soft and very good at holding powder, adding to ease of application. Other hairs that are used for makeup brushes include sable, pony (fortunately not of the My Little variety), something called camel (which apparently is not camel at all but rather a combination of squirrel, goat and pony hair), and (you guessed it) squirrel (which is apparently the softest of the hairs, but for some reason just feels wrong). There are also synthetic brushes of course, which might sit a little bit better with the conscience. However, from what I read the hair is obtained through shearing rather than 'knocking off' the animals.

The two goat hair brushes in the Australis set (the fluffy eye shadow brush and the large fluffy brush) do feel very soft and do apply product well, as opposed to the synthetic angle brush which is a bit scratchy and hard (never the best feeling close to ones eyeballs). So in conclusion I'm still not really sure how I feel about them, can I live with the thought of a herd of goats being cold just so that I may have something soft to apply my eye shadow with?

Any thoughts?