Sonicare Brush Heads: The Ultimate Self-Cleaning Toothbrush
What possible reason could anyone have for buying something like this? After all, we’ve been brushing our teeth without the benefits of proper sterilization for centuries and the majority of us don’t seem to have suffered particularly badly from it. Well, for those of us with the Howard Hughes disposition (or who just hate the thought of germs infesting our brush heads), the Philips Sonicare brush heads seems to be quite a good idea. A plastic oval unit about 18cm high and 10cm wide, it holds either two Philips Sonicare brush heads or two Oral-B FlossAction or FlexiSoft brushes in the included adapter trays. I don’t know if the ProBright heads can be cleaned although they do fit on the trays so I don’t see why they shouldn’t be.
You place brushes on the trays inside the unit with their heads facing a small ultra violet lamp in the center, then switch it on and after a 10-minute cleaning cycle the unit turns off and your brushes should be sterile and free of bugs. The inside of the Sonicare is coated in a reflective material so the UV light gets right around the entire brush, and it’s supposedly able to kill of E.coli (nasty), Streptococcus mutans (a significant contributor to tooth decay, according to Wikipedia) and the very unpleasant Herpes simplex virus. I can’t comment on how effective the sanitisation is but my Oral-B Triumph brushes certainly have a dentist-fresh, sterile smell when I take them out. I do find that Sonicare brushes take on a slightly brownish tinge after several weeks of cleaning them in the sanitizer, which is possibly the UV light reacting somehow with the plastic, although this seems to be purely cosmetic and doesn’t seem to harm the brushes at all.
As Oral-B brushes are smaller than their Philips counterparts there’s enough room inside the Sonicare to clean more than two of them so it would have been nice if provision had been made for another two adapters to be included. The unit also feels pretty cheap and a fall from any kind of height will undoubtedly reduce it to pieces so in that respect the three-foot electricity cable could perhaps have been a bit longer. The cord itself comes with a two-pin shaver plug, rather than a standard three-pin plug, at the end so you’ll need to find either a shaver point to put it into or buy an adaptor.
Purely as yet another bathroom gadget, this at first seems to have little use, although when you begin to investigate how germs grow and spread on brushes it starts to make more sense. It’s relatively cheap and (being nothing more than a plastic housing with a UV lamp inside) uses little electricity, so for the peace of mind of having a properly clean brush every day I wouldn’t be without it. Just please don’t blame me if you buy one and turn into a toothbrush hypochondriac overnight.
