Get a Grip
Forget the Eames chair, the Le Corbusier sofa. The once-lowly toothbrush is now winning design awards. Years from now, in fact, we might look back at this era as the Golden Age of Toothbrush Design.
Today’s toothbrushes have curves, arches, waves and squiggles. They have rubber grips, thumb stops and ergonomic shapes. The nylon bristles are micro-textured, multicolored, multileveled and multi-angled; they have long bristle tips to get behind those hard-to-reach back molars. They can be flexible or squishy, ridged or rippled, full or compact.
Manufacturers are coming out with new models and variations at a rate more identified with the car industry. The $650-million-a-year business is big and getting bigger. And new designs, as well as design awards, are helping fuel consumer interest.
Market leader Oral-B’s new CrossAction brush took honors in a juried competition sponsored by I.D., the design magazine, along with Colgate-Palmolive’s Grip’Ems children’s brushes, which were praised for interestingly amorphic-shaped handles that didn’t resort to licensed cartoon characters.
“There are plenty of other toothbrushes that are just a pretty styling job,” said Chee Pearlman, editor of I.D. The Cross-Action toothbrush “is moving in the category of high-end car. They’ve put some serious engineering into it.”
The toothbrush, with a plump ergonomic handle and multileveled bristles that are set at different angles to better penetrate around and between teeth, was introduced last year at the previously unheard-of mass market price of $4.99.
“It’s striking as a breakthrough and as an object,” Pearlman enthused. “It’s quite beautiful-when you get up close, it’s almost like a creature. You can see how intensely designed it is and how much engineering went into such a small object.”
Why all this attention to toothbrush design?
Attention to dental health, consumer preferences, new production technologies and new materials all play a role, but the real fuel seems to be coming from the dynamics of the marketplace itself.
“All the toothbrush manufacturers are innovating at a very rapid rate,” said Tom Baxter, brand manager for Aquafresh’s Flex toothbrush, a flexible-necked toothbrush from SmithKline Beecham. “Innovations are necessary in today’s market to compete.”
Max Yoshimoto, vice president of Palo Alto- and San Francisco-based Lunar Design, helped create the CrossAction. He said: “As products reach a certain level of maturity in any category, design plays an even more important role. That’s what a manufacturer can use to differentiate his product and create something innovative,” he said, “especially when pricing has leveled out and products are on a par.”
The high-style, fat-grip, ergonomic brush with the crisscrossing bristles and the $54-million advertising budget helped propel Oral-B’s U.S. market share from about a quarter of toothbrush sales to more than 30% in the weeks following its launch, according to the company’s director of new product development, Maisie Wong-Paredes.
The Lunar designers worked for three years with a team from Oral-B in a process that included numerous prototypes and studies of how people grip their brushes. They were told to create an ergonomic brush handle that would also communicate, through its sleek styling, that this was a high-end product worth paying double what mass-market toothbrushes usually cost. (Some brushes, such as the Radius, cost as much as $8.29. Manufactured by two former architects in Kutztown, Pa., the fat, squat-looking Radius has a handle that angles sharply to left or right and is now in the Smithsonian Institute’s permanent national design collection.)
While Oral-B says its bristles remove more plaque than that of the competition, all toothbrush makers claim their products will enhance dental health. And the restless consumer has plenty to choose from: Johnson & Johnson’s Reach--the first brush with an angled handle, with the upper portion bent like a dental pick to more easily reach the back of the mouth--offers seven styles for adults and five for children. Crest’s Deep Sweep has long, soft outside bristles to clean plaque at the gum line, and joins at least four other models, each with different bristle and handle configurations. The British-made Wisdom Orbital has a circular head to promote a circular cleaning motion. Mentadent ProCare has a flexible-handled brush, large oval head and flaring outer bristles.
Aquafresh’s Flex toothbrush, introduced in 1991, features a tight S-shaped squiggle at the neck to signify its flexibility.
“Dentists find that people brush too hard, and it’s been proven that our design protects the gum by relieving excess pressures. It’s like a shock absorber for your car,” said Tom Baxter, brand manager for the Flex.
Colgate-Palmolive, which offers its distinctive curvy-handled Wave and its Colgate Total, last year added the Navigator, which has a flexible head to relieve excessive pressure on the gums and follow the contours of the teeth.
What do dentists say about this frenzy of design? The American Dental Assn. says that all the brushes given its seal of approval clean effectively and help reduce gingivitis, although it is not clear from short-term studies whether any one brush is significantly better than any other. Nor is it clear, says the group, whether better attention to thorough brushing by study participants, rather than the toothbrushes, accounts for the good results.
“I don’t think there’s a product that is heads and shoulders above the others,” said Dr. Wayne Wozniak, director of evaluation criteria for the Chicago-based ADA. “I’d say the differences are rather small. The patient will have a large effect on how the product will perform.”
Using that toothbrush, in other words, is more effective than gazing at it with appreciation for its design.
