When guests snoop
through your
bathroom, let them
know exactly who
you are (from top): an
Instagram shopper
(Hello Toothpaste), a
Parisian dandy
(Buly 1803 Opiat
Dentaire), a wellness
warrior (Public
Goods Toothpaste).Is
toothpaste
cool
now?
A look at one dental product’s quest
to gain street cred—and sex appeal.
By Brennan Kilbane
photographed by will anderson
PHENOMENON
Beauty products have their charms:
the rich butteriness of a cream,
the vivid color of a lipstick, the
fragrant bouquet of a perfume. The
exception, perhaps, is toothpaste.
Its most compelling attributes
have been restricted to being the
mintiest or most ultra/extra/super
whitening-est. But if toothpaste
makers have anything to say about it,
that changes here and now. Take
Twice, a toothpaste set launched last
year by the photogenic sons of a
New York City dentist: The brand
emphasizes twice-daily brushing by56 ALLURE MAY 2019
offering you a bracing minty formula
for morning and a soothing lavender
for evening. This is so uninteresting
that it hurts to write—until I see that
Lenny Kravitz, a patient of Dad’s, is a
cofounder; then it becomes slightly
more interesting, but not enough to
sell me two kinds of toothpaste at
once (though the fact that 10 percent
of their profits go toward providing
pop-up clinics in places without
dental care might be). Others try to
seduce the Whole Foods crowd:
Toothpastes from Public Goods and
Davids, like many on this page, are
free of parabens and phthalates
and foaming agents. Davids ups the
ante with sustainable packaging
(recyclable metal tubes). Neither
includes fluoride, a mineral that
doctors say keeps your teeth strong
and conspiracy theorists suspect can
be used in high concentrations as a
mind-control device. Still others, like
the snaked one at right, from storied
French brand Buly 1803, attempt
to dazzle with artful packaging and
rarefied ingredients. (This one is
infused with healing thermal water
from Castéra-Verduzan.) Fellow
French brand Lebon serves up its
pastes in gilded tubes and names
them after vraiment chic vacation
spots, like Cap Ferrat and Antibes.
Both cost more than $20 for a
standard-size tube. The non-French,
non-$20 ($6.99, to be exact)
toothpastes from Hello Products
are nothing if not the zenith of
trendy buzzwordiness. They cobble
together açai, hemp-seed oil,
activated charcoal, and relentless,
retina-searing positivity (hashtags:
#awesomefloss, #brushhappy), and
actually, I am kind of into it. But
maybe that’s just the fluoride talking. PROP STYLIST: STEPHANIE YEH