For years, oral care routines have remained stubbornly divided: brushing first, flossing second. Dyson has spent six years upending that formula with a device that combines an electric toothbrush and an automated oral irrigator into a single handheld tool. Unveiled by Dyson in Paris, the new appliance attempts to solve what company founder James Dyson described as a universal frustration with traditional flossing.
The company best known for floor care, hair care and air purifiers has unveiled its first toothbrush and, as you might expect from the brand, it’s like no other. For James Dyson, oral care is deeply personal before it becomes technological. “Every time I go to the hygienist, she gets the pickax out and starts hitting away at all the plaque that’s hardened up and says, ‘You must floss, you must floss.’ I bought one of those jet flosses, and my mouth filled with water very quickly and I kept spitting it out. It was painful, and I don’t think I was hitting the spot,” recalled the British inventor, who also tried plastic floss tools as hard and as often as he could, but they also yielded little results. That frustration became the brief for Dyson’s first foray into oral care, a device that would get to plaque while it is still soft and sticky, like melted toffee,
before it turns rock hard. I’ve thought for the last few years that we must do something where you floss as you brush. So it’s not a separate thing that you do afterward that takes another five minutes. It’s as easy as brushing your teeth with an electric toothbrush,
said Dyson, whose lifestyle brand is today synonymous with game-changing technology and standout aesthetics across floor care, hair care, air treatment, headphones, lighting and now oral care.
How Gap Optical Targeting Works Inside the Mouth
Just below the brush head is a tiny camera with a 100,000-pixel resolution and a strobing light, analyzing 28 live images every second.
The artificial intelligence algorithm behind the system was trained on 470,000 dental images that Dyson collected during the six years it spent developing the product. Within 100 milliseconds of detecting an interdental gap, the device releases a burst of mouth rinse. The brush vibrates at up to 58,000 times a minute, and the software anticipates where the gaps are as you brush, so it can spray the liquid at the right time and place, as detailed by Forbes reporting.
“If you shake your iPhone like that, you won’t do a very good film. We’ve got to do a film operating in slurry in your mouth, a perfect film to be clear enough to find the gap and cope with that shaking.”
James Dyson, Chief Engineer at Dyson, via WWD
Conical Jets Versus Traditional Water Flossers
Standard stand-alone water flossers typically rely on what Dyson’s engineering team calls a needle-type jet. The fluid jet itself has some interesting engineering; Dyson notes that it’s a conical jet, which the company claims removes plaque more effectively than the needle-type jets
typically employed, using a wider blast so it can effectively remove plaque with less pressure, making the CameraJet’s flossing mechanism gentler on enamel and gums.
The answer is the Dyson CameraJet, a camera-equipped electric toothbrush six years in the making, involving 661 Dyson engineers and 38 patents. It uses artificial intelligence to detect gaps and fire a micro-jet of mouth rinse exactly where plaque forms, all while brushing. After using the prototype for six months, Dyson returned to the hygienist. This time, she had nothing to do but a little bit of polishing.
Reservoir Engineering and Anti-Gravity Mechanics
The mouthwash is contained in the brush, in a 12.5ml reservoir that’s designed so that it doesn’t stop or clog, whichever way up you are holding the brush.
How you hold it is one of the many items in the how-to videos supplied in the MyDyson companion app. You need to hold it horizontally and move the brush in slow, oval movements for the brush to see the gaps.
Pricing, Color Options, and Privacy Controls
As the name implies, the $499 CameraJet is the first electric toothbrush to incorporate a camera into the brush head. Available starting today in ceramic blue or ceramic pink color options, it can let you inspect the inside of your mouth by livestreaming video over Wi-Fi to your phone. But the camera also works alongside an AI algorithm to detect and blast the gaps between your teeth with mouthwash.
That price isn’t cheap, but it’s also only slightly more expensive than other premium smart toothbrushes that don’t have its camera-plus-spray setup. The toothbrush’s AI analyzes 28 live images from the camera every second as part of a feature Dyson hails as Gap Optical Targeting, without storing them on the device or sending them to the cloud.
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