Dyson’s already made a name for itself with gadgets designed to clean a home, but the company has been slowly expanding into personal care devices too, and according to recent patent filings, a Dyson toothbrush might be in the works, with a design that both brushes and flosses.
The Dyson brand is synonymous with vacuum cleaners, and while some of the company’s attempts to branch out into other devices didn’t quite work out, it’s had lots of success outside of cleaning, but mostly in the washroom with hand dryers, hair dryers, curling irons, and straighteners. Dyson still makes vacuum cleaners, including models with frickin’ lasers on them now, but it could be bringing its expertise in cleaning to your pearly whites.
Don’t worry, the company doesn’t have any plans to suck the plaque off your teeth. But in a patent filed on April 22, 2021, a device referred to as a “dental cleaning appliance” is described as having a built-in refillable reservoir for “storing a working fluid” that can be delivered to the “oral cavity of a user” while they’re brushing. It’s not certain if that working fluid is a liquid toothpaste, but the patent also makes reference to “interproximal cleaning” so what’s more likely is that the toothbrush doubles as a Waterpik-type device, pumping a fine stream of fluid in-between teeth as a gentler alternative to dental floss.
Dyson is well known for its premium-priced devices, and a squirting toothbrush doesn’t sound like an appliance from a company whose air purifiers count every particle of pollutant they’re removing from the air, so the patent goes on to describe how the toothbrush will possibly operate in one of two modes. There’s a manual mode where the fluid delivery system is only activated when the user presses a button, but that’s paired with an automatic mode that sounds like the toothbrush’s head can sense when it’s moving from tooth to tooth, and when it passes over a gap, the fluid nozzle is activated to clean in-between teeth. Now that sounds like a $US200 ($257)-$US400 ($513) toothbrush.
There’s no timeline on when the toothbrush will be available to consumers as a real product, or if it will ever actually see the light of day. Companies often file for patents just as a way to prevent other companies from releasing a similar product. And the illustrations Dyson has included, which look like an electric toothbrush with a bulbous growth on it, don’t necessarily reflect what a consumer-ready version of the product would potentially look like.