A Brief History of the Toothbrush (And Why It Stopped Evolving in 1985)

The toothbrush is older than you think and newer than you think, and it has spent most of its history changing constantly and the last forty years not changing at all.

Some quick history, because the story is more interesting than I expected when I started reading about it.

People have been cleaning their teeth with sticks for at least five thousand years. The Babylonians used chew sticks. The Egyptians frayed the end of a twig and used it like a tiny brush. The Chinese, around the 1400s, took the bristles from the back of a pig’s neck and tied them to a bamboo handle. That was the first toothbrush that looks recognizable to us. A handle, bristles, the basic geometry of the thing.

The pig-bristle brush was the global standard for almost five hundred years. It went to England, then to France, then to America. William Addis, a British prisoner in the 1770s, made the first mass-produced version. He carved cattle bone for the handle and drilled holes for the bristles. The Addis company sold them for over two hundred years.

Then came nylon, in 1938. DuPont synthesized it and the toothbrush handle, almost overnight, became plastic and the bristles became nylon. The brush you have in your bathroom today is, in its essential form, the 1938 brush. Plastic handle. Nylon bristles. Slight curve. Color choices.

That is the design that has dominated for almost ninety years.

The decade everything froze

I went down a rabbit hole one weekend trying to figure out the exact moment the toothbrush stopped evolving. I thought it would be hard to pin down. It turned out to be embarrassingly easy.

Between roughly 1950 and 1985, toothbrushes got a tremendous number of small upgrades. The ergonomic handle. The angled neck. The bristle variety, soft and medium and hard. The colored handles. The rubber grip. The first electric toothbrush, in 1954. The first oscillating head. The first toothbrush specifically marketed for children. The first travel toothbrush. The first toothbrush with a tongue scraper on the back.

After 1985, the rate of meaningful innovation slows dramatically. Yes, you get the spinning Sonicare in 1992. You get a few attempts at unusual head shapes through the 90s and early 2000s. You get the marketing arms race around whitening and gum health. You get the slow takeover of the dental aisle by the same three or four companies who own the same three or four brands.

But the shape of the brush you actually pick up in 2026 is not meaningfully different from the shape of the brush you would have picked up in 1985. Same handle. Same head. Same plastic. Same blister pack on the shelf at CVS.

For comparison. Cars from 1985 versus cars now. Phones from 1985 versus phones now. Coffee makers from 1985 versus coffee makers now. Running shoes from 1985 versus running shoes now. Everything around the toothbrush moved forward in measurable, often dramatic ways. The toothbrush stayed where it was.

Why this happened

Three reasons, as best I can tell.

The first is consolidation. By the mid-1980s, the dental category had consolidated into a small number of very large companies. Colgate-Palmolive. Procter and Gamble. Unilever. Johnson and Johnson. Once a category consolidates, the incentive shifts from innovation to defense. You do not need to make a better toothbrush. You need to make sure the next toothbrush people buy is also yours. The marketing budget gets bigger. The product budget gets smaller.

The second is the factory. Once you have built a factory around a specific shape of plastic stick, that factory becomes a constraint on the future. Any genuinely new design requires retooling. Retooling costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The math almost never works for the incumbent. So the incumbent makes the same brush. The new entrant cannot compete on shelf space against the incumbent’s marketing budget. The category goes quiet.

The third reason, and this is the one nobody likes to say out loud, is that the category convinced itself that the brush was solved. That the only remaining innovation surface was at the bristle level. Softer bristles. Differently angled bristles. Tapered tips. Polishing tips. Bristles infused with this or that mineral. The entire research and development budget of the global dental industry has been pointed, for forty years, at the half-inch of bristle at the end of a plastic stick.

That is a category that has stopped asking the bigger questions.

What the bigger questions look like

A few examples of questions the category stopped asking somewhere around 1985.

What if the toothbrush were not made of plastic? Bamboo has been tried, briefly, in the sustainability corner. Wood has been tried. Metal has been tried, mostly for travel. None of them ever broke through, because the incumbents control the shelf and the shelf is plastic.

What if the head were a different shape? The flat rectangular head is a design choice, not a physiological requirement. There is no medical reason teeth need to be cleaned with a rectangle. Other shapes work fine. Some work better.

What if the cleaning surface were different? Bristles are not the only thing that cleans teeth. Sponges, fabrics, softer materials, all clean differently. None of them have been seriously explored at scale.

What if the brush were beautiful? This is, of course, the question I am the most interested in. It is also the question that has been most thoroughly ignored. Forty years of innovation budget, and not a single dollar of it has been spent on whether the object would be worth putting on a shelf.

Where we come in

I started Polished because I think the category froze, and I think a small brand with a clear point of view can unfreeze it.

We rethought the head shape. Ours is a diamond, not a rectangle. We rethought the cleaning surface. There is a soft white circular polisher disc in the center, surrounded by perimeter bristles. The polisher is patented (US-2026076473-A1). It changes the brushing motion. I will write more about it specifically when the time is right.

We rethought the color palette. Master charcoal, and seven accent colors that were chosen the way a paint company chooses colors, not the way a drugstore brand chooses colors.

We rethought the object as a whole. The toothbrush is, in our view, a piece of personal-use industrial design. It should be designed the way a Hario coffee dripper is designed. Form following function, but form also mattering on its own.

This is, I admit, not a revolution. We are not curing cavities. We are not replacing brushing with some magical new technology. We are taking an object that the category forgot to design and designing it.

Forty years late, but here we are.

Richard