Has a gossip email newsletter just leaked details of an upcoming Dyson electric toothbrush?
In between its usual banter, the notorious UK-based newsletter Popbitch this week claimed that “Dyson’s soon-to-launch new product [is] a toothbrush”.
Now, Dyson products don’t often get leaked but patents do emerge from time to time – we saw patent details of the 2023 Dyson Zone back in 2020 (reported by Bloomberg) – and it was originally filed two years before that in 2018.
And, hey presto, we have seen patent details of a Dyson toothbrush with a built-in flosser emerge before, reported by Gizmodo back in 2021. Yes, a built-in flosser.
But while there’s been precious little on the subject since, it wouldn’t be a surprise that it’s taken so long to come to market. Dyson has a long history of iterating hundreds – if not thousands – of times on its new products and so spending a long time perfecting them.
I’ve seen that first-hand from various prototype parts of other products located at Dyson’s UK HQ in Malmsbury, Wiltshire, UK. Not least its most notorious unreleased project, the Dyson electric car, which is parked up beside a cafe. However, Dyson’s most confidential products are developed in a mirrored building called D9 – and people like me are very much not allowed in there.
In the 2021 electric toothbrush patent filed at the US Patent Office, the product shown was certainly very different from other toothbrushes and probably doesn’t reflect the final design of any upcoming product.
Because of the tech involved, there was a bulb halfway up the tube reminiscent of a space telescope. The patent described this as a refillable reservoir for “storing a working fluid” that would be injected into the mouth, presumably during brushing, to presumably clean in the same way a water-based flosser device would.
The patent also suggested that the toothbrush could be able to detect when it moves over gaps in the teeth and therefore when it would need to floss, which would be an upgrade on your standard electric toothbrush for sure.
And there’s even earlier reference to either the same patent or a related one in this Evening Standard article from 2016. So if the Dyson electric toothbrush does launch at some point later in the year, it will most likely have been in development for a decade plus.
