The capitalist man has a tendency to complicate (and charge for) everything around him. Want to go running in 2026? Buy a pro running shoes, drink whey protein every day, sign up and pay to run with other people and receive a banana and a cheap tin medal at the finish line.<\/p>\n
For a long time, I regarded the electric toothbrush as one of those low-return, almost useless advances, even though I had never used one. It didn’t help that, until a few years ago, it was an object I only saw in American movies and TV shows \u2014 the United States being one of the world leaders in inventing dispensable gadgets.<\/p>\n
About a year ago, in mid-2025, I bought one. I don’t remember whether I was influenced by something I read (likely), only that the price seemed reasonable enough to give convenience a chance.<\/p>\n
I went with the Xiaomi Mijia T100, the Chinese manufacturer’s most basic model. In use, it vibrates the equivalent of 16,500 strokes per minute, which puts it among the slowest on the market. There are ultrasonic toothbrushes<\/a>, powered by piezoelectric crystals, capable of much faster movements, in the range of millions per minute!<\/p>\n Besides being simple, the Mijia T100 is an old design. The battery charging port is the old microUSB, and the brush has no Bluetooth to connect to the Mi Home app, which, according to Xiaomi, \u201crecognizes your movements and alerts you via the app\u201d in order to correct improper brushing. Don’t get me wrong: I see the absence of Bluetooth as an advantage.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The action of a sonic electric toothbrush is identical to that of a conventional (or \u201cmanual\u201d) one \u2014 that is, the mechanical friction of the bristles against the teeth and gums. Just easier. Yes, I know, brushing your teeth is far from an exhausting task. The problems, at least for me, have always been keeping a consistent brushing routine and dosing the force applied to the brush.<\/p>\n Contrary to what many people believe, proper brushing is done with gentle movements, without applying force to the brush. If your bristles fray within two or three months, that’s a sign of excessive force, which doesn’t improve hygiene and still hurts your gums. In more severe cases, it causes gum recession, exposing the tooth roots and causing pain and discomfort.<\/p>\n The electric brush mitigates or eliminates that risk. You just hold the brush lightly, rest the bristles at the base of the teeth, next to the gumline, and let it do the work. The vibration of the bristles removes the dirt and, more importantly, without collateral damage.<\/p>\n It’s so subtle that, in the first few days, I worried whether it was cleaning properly. Over time, I got used to its subtlety and became certain it was working after my annual dental cleaning.<\/p>\n The dentist who saw me said my hygiene was good and only asked me to pay more attention to the base of the lower front teeth and to the last ones at the back, also on the bottom. Not coincidentally, these are harder-to-reach areas, squeezed by the lower lip and the cheeks. Nothing serious, though. I noticed that, in fact, reaching those spots takes some attention.<\/p>\n The back of my lower teeth, which always earned me a scolding from the dentist until I started using an electric toothbrush, was spotless.<\/p>\n Another nice feature of the electric toothbrush is the built-in timer. Each brushing session lasts exactly two minutes, 30 seconds for each quadrant of the dental arch. (Plus a few extra seconds afterward to brush the tongue, done manually.) It’s a safeguard of good hygiene against laziness or haste. Hooray for standardization!<\/p>\n Xiaomi claims that \u201cwith just 4 hours of charging you can use the T100 for up to 30 days,\u201d which I couldn’t confirm in practice. A full charge lasts between seven and eight days of use, considering a minimum of three brushings per day. Still, that’s a good enough interval.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n After a little over a year using an electric toothbrush, I don’t see myself going back. Even the simplest of them offers tangible benefits over manual ones: gentler brushing and a consistency to the process that is hard \u2014 perhaps impossible \u2014 to maintain on your own.<\/p>\n On the other hand, I’m not convinced that ultrasonic brushes are that much better than sonic ones. A 2020 study<\/a>, published in the Dentistry Journal, validates the superiority of the electric toothbrush over the conventional one, but warns that the differences in dental plaque reduction by ultrasonic versus sonic toothbrushes were not statistically significant.<\/p>\n