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Your scalp constantly sheds and secretes and flakes. It might sound icky, but with that feat of regeneration, lots of those dispelled bits end up in your hairbrush. It’s amazing! It’s disgusting. You need to clean that brush.

For insight on tending to your hairbrush, we consulted a trichologist—an expert in skin and hair—and two hairstylists who clean dozens of brushes a week.

Gross news, folks: The stuff in your brush isn’t merely dust. It’s also dead skin cells and scalp oil and broken hair clumps and product residue. See? I told you, gross.

Grosser yet, “additional bacteria and fungus can grow on the material inside the brush,” said trichologist William Gaunitz, founder of Advanced Trichology. That lingering material can cause flare-ups for someone with a scalp condition like dandruff or seborrheic dermatitis. So cleaning is crucial.

This will vary, depending on how much you shed and what products you use. In general, you should be washing your brush at least every two weeks.

You can tell whether your brush needs a bath just by looking at it: Is there visible gunk in it? Is it “dusty?” Time to clean.

Nothing fancy! Just these items:

Using your fingers, yank out the hair wrapped around the brush bristles. If the stuck hair is particularly dense or resistant to removal, you can try cutting through it using scissors. The pointy end of a comb works for Katharine Boss, a Los Angeles–based hairstylist and owner of the Freija Collective salon. You could also try using chopsticks, a pen, or any other pointy object. Removing hair will help free up many of the larger clumps of dust and scalp oil, making it easier to get at the smaller, more-stuck-on parts later.

You should actually get in the habit of removing hair from your brush after every use, since a clogged brush can damage your mane. “As the hair gets tangled in the brush, it is going to create more resistance while you’re brushing,” Gaunitz warned. “That’s creating a greater tugging action, which could lead to more breakage or shedding.”

In a bowl or sink, add some soap to warm water, and swish until you have a sudsy solution. For synthetic brushes, any soap will work. Plastic and rubber are tough materials, so dish soap, shampoo, and body wash are all fine to use. For brushes made with natural material (like wood or boar bristles), Boss suggested using a mild shampoo free of sulfates—like those from GM Reverie or Davines—which won’t break down the bristles.

If you’ve got a synthetic brush, place it in the soapy water, making sure the bristles are submerged. Then soak it for 10 minutes, to break down stubborn clumps.

If you have a wooden hairbrush, don’t soak it. Instead, briefly dip your brush, bristles-side down, in the water. Then use a toothbrush to scrub in between the bristles and the brush pad, said Sunny Moon, a stylist at Harbor Salon in Los Angeles.

After you soak your brush, most of the yucky bits should be easier to remove. Using a toothbrush or your fingers, scrub between the bristles and along the base of the brush. Dunk the brush into the water as needed. You might have to use your fingers to slide any particularly clingy gunk up individual bristles.

Now that you’ve completed the visceral horror that is removing your own human detritus, rinse the brush under running water to remove any soapy residue. Whatever’s left on the brush is going back on your head, so make sure to rinse it well.

Squeeze your wet brush repeatedly, to remove any water that entered the cushioned part. “You definitely want to avoid water getting trapped inside of your brush as this could cause bacteria to grow,” Boss said. Don’t worry if there is some lingering moisture—anything you can’t squeeze out will evaporate. Just let the brush rest on a towel, bristle-side down, and it should dry out fine.

This article was edited by Catherine Kast and Amy Koplin.

Dorie Chevlen is a staff writer from Youngstown, Ohio, now living in Los Angeles. She has worked as a copy editor, fact checker, and sandwich maker, but this is probably her favorite gig. Her writing has also been published in Science, Slate, and The Wall Street Journal, among others. She has been called—both flatteringly and not—“a lot.”

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