The design of the brush is equally forward-thinking, though with its odd taper at the bottom and top-heaviness, it can feel rather unbalanced while brushing. The brush component is a standard ultrasonic variety (the company says it vibrates at 40,000 strokes per minute), with two power settings available. To clean the brush head, you flip the brush upside down and place it into the cleaning chamber of the base station. (Full disclosure: I didn’t do any petri dish lab testing to measure how much bacteria had truly been slain.) A heat-based drying system sucks out lingering moisture, further stalling bacterial growth. When done brushing, you simply drop the brush head down through the top of the base, which activates a ring of UV-C lights inside, bathing the brush head in germ-killing power for five minutes.

The design of the base station-which charges and cleans the toothbrush-lands somewhere between a single bud flower vase and a miniature nuclear cooling tower. With its Sonic Toothbrush, Tao Clean aims to combine style and function, radically rethinking the electronic toothbrush with design squarely in mind, while outfitting it with a similar UV-based cleaning system. It’s quite homely, better suited in design for a dentist’s office than a consumer’s bathroom. The Philips system works great-or, at least, it works great at keeping me from fretting about airborne feces on my toothbrush. This handy device bathes a pair of toothbrush heads in ultraviolet light, zapping germs and keeping the brush heads in a sealed chamber until their next use. I’ve long relied on the Philips Sonicare FlexCare Platinum as a quick fix for such issues. And yet, here we are, virtually all of us brushing our teeth just a few feet away from the toilet.

As invisible threats like coronavirus and disease-resistant staphylococci close in, we find ourselves in an age where one simply can’t be too careful.

Tao toothbrush replacement heads