Oral-B teen
Buy now £40, Amazon.co.uk
- Cleaning technology: Oscillating-rotating
- 30-second pacer: Yes
- 2-minute pacer: Yes
- Pressure sensor: Yes
- Travel case: No
- Operating time: 17 days
- Charge time: 13 hours
With the brush comes the obligatory pressure sensor, 30-second timer and quadpacer, which is a good way to teach teens good brushing habits.
Oral-B has kept modes to a minimum – daily clean, sensitive and whitening – with each one accessed by pressing the power button once.
Unfortunately, you can’t choose your mode until the brush is powered on, which is one of the most annoying traits of the power teen compared to models where you can choose your mode prior to brushing. This means that you really need to make sure that you’ve got the brush head in your mouth, with the toothpaste, before you power on, or else you’re likely to pepper your bathroom mirror with tiny white spots of paste.
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Another slight problem we have with the modal system of the brush is that it doesn’t remember what mode you finished your clean with and will reset to daily clean every time the brush is powered down – so if you’d rather the sensitive or whitening mode, you’ll have to cycle through to them at the start of your brushing routine.
The brush doesn’t feature any icons that light up to tell you what mode you’re in, but this obviously feeds into the lower price point. In fact, the only way to see what mode you’re in is by using it in conjunction with the app, but we found that after using it for a few days it wasn’t much of a stretch to remember the modes and the order that they come in.
Similarly, there’s no icon indicator to tell you when you need to change the brush heads, but all Oral-B heads have blue bristle indicators that get paler and paler to remind the user when the bristles are reaching the end of their lives and need to be changed.
The appThe power teen is a connected brush with real-time feedback, an on-screen timer, and imagery that shows the user where to brush, including how many times you applied too much pressure, which can damage gums.
Pairing the brush wasn’t a problem, although you’ll find that when you do the brush won’t connect to all the features in the app and, most significantly, it doesn’t support brushing coverage recognition, so if this is a feature that you're particularly looking for in a smart brush or one that you think will benefit your teen, then clearly this model is not the right choice.
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Aside from that, the brush has all the smarts that you would need without bombarding you with dental data when you haven’t even woken up yet. For parents, giving a teen another reason to be glued to their phone might not be a selling point, but the app will tell them how well they’re cleaning and you might find that having this information coming from their Android or Apple oracle might make them sit up and take notice more than if they were being told by a dentist or a parent. For anyone else using the brush, they will benefit from the already proven Oral-B companion app.
CleaningWho better to test the cleaning capabilities of the Power Teen, than a 17-year-old with braces? The tester’s usual brush was a Philips sonicare and they noticed an immediate difference in the rotating action of the Oral-B in combination with the bristle pattern of the ortho head, saying that the brush provided a thorough clean and made it easier to clean along the gum line, which is harder to reach with braces.
The brush did a good job of getting into hard-to-reach areas towards the back of the mouth and also getting into the smaller spaces where food particles and plaque are easily trapped.
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What our tester was most impressed with was how clean their mouth felt and how good the brush was at thoroughly cleaning the braces and getting in behind the wiring without them having to apply too much pressure, which can often damage the adjustment wires.
Edges and biting surfaces were also easily covered and our tester found that the best mode to use was whitening, which builds the speed from slow to fast over a couple of seconds, then cycles back to slow and begins again.
Of course, if you don’t have braces there is also the sensi ultrathin head provided, which features thin bristles that get right into the area where the gum and tooth meet, which is often very hard to clean.
Battery lifeAlong with travellers, teens are probably the one group that could really benefit from some serious battery life, as replacing the brush on the charging cradle (and picking up the towel from the floor) is not usually a high priority for them once they’ve finished in the bathroom.
In this regard, the power teen is more than adequate and we consistently achieved two and a half weeks of brushing (based on two two-minute sessions a day) from a full charge, which takes 13 hours.