It’s always important to maintain good oral hygiene, but it’s especially important when you have an orthodontic brace fitted, due to all the wires and bands in a brace there are many more hiding places for plaque to get going and wreck your oral health. It’s because of this extra work that needs doing that manual toothbrushes are not the best tool for the job, as they have a much harder time cleaning all those additional nooks and crannies, but by contrast, an electric toothbrush is a perfect choice.
If you think about it, a manual toothbrush has to be dragged back-and-forth or up and down by your own hand, so the cleaning movements you can deliver to your teeth is quite limited (unless you have a naturally shaky hand! An electric toothbrush can naturally move much quicker than your hand ever could, with thousands of small and effective movements concentrated on the very small area.
Braun Oral-B and Philips Sonicare are still the two best-known and most widely available names in the electric toothbrush market, so we take look at a selection of the best brushes from each. Here are three great electric toothbrushes from each manufacturer, each one great at making sure that your braces and teeth are kept sparkling clean.
Today we will review 6 representative models from Oral-B and Sonicare to see how they can give you thoroughly clean teeth when you are wearing the orthodontic brace.
Oral-B Pro 6000
The Oral-B Pro 6000 is well-suited to the needs of brace wearers because it alerts you if you are pressing on too hard. This is something that a lot of people do automatically, and that’s why Oral-B have included this feature. The brush detects when you’re going at it a bit too vigorously, and then it warns you with an LED light and by slowing down the brush speed if you carry on for too long. When you have braces you might be tempted to over brush because you think it’s going to help, but over brushing is never good because it can damage enamel and inflame your gums.
The other great feature of the Oral-B pro 6000 is the Bluetooth connectivity. The brush can talk to your smartphone app, and the app can encourage you to follow your dentist’s brushing recommendations. It will also tell you how long to spend cleaning each area of your mouth. 2 minutes is the usually recommended amount, with 30 seconds spent on the top left and top right, bottom left and bottom right.
The Pro 6000 has Bluetooth which connects it to a downloadable smartphone App. This guides you to follow dentist recommendations too, to make sure that your brushing is super-effective.
Daily Clean, Gum Care, Sensitive, Whitening, and Pro-Clean are the names of the 5 cleaning modes. In daily use there is not much to choose between them. It’s hard to know if any of them is truly more effective than anyone other things it claims to do. Still, it can’t hurt to have a little choice, and if you like these modes then you might want to buy the different cleaning heads that go with them.
The Pro 6000 comes with just the CrossAction head, but that’s okay because it the same like a good all-rounder. Its bristles are angled and are good at reaching right in between the teeth. Oral-B claims that they are 3 times better at removing plaque than an ordinary toothbrush, which is good to know for brace wearers.
The battery is a lithium-ion and it will keep motoring for around 12 days of use, assuming that you’re sticking to your 4 minutes total brushing a day. If it does start to run out of steam then the Pro 6000 will let you know that it needs a recharge.
If you do begin to think that it’s not holding power as long as it did when you first bought it, then make sure that you are running it down until it’s completely flat at least once every 6 months. Doing this actually prolongs the life of a lithium-ion battery.
All in all, this brush represents good value and it won’t disappoint.
Oral-B Pro 7000
The Oral-B Pro 7000 is another great brush that comes with Bluetooth connectivity. It gives up to 800 brush movements every second, which is good news because this kind of speed ensures that brace wearers don’t have to work too hard to ensure that plaque is broken up and whisked away.
The Oral-B 7000 offers six built-in brushing modes called daily clean, deep clean, whitening, massage, sensitive and tongue cleaning. I’ve never been convinced about the need for tongue cleaning personally, but it doesn’t hurt to have the odd extra feature to play with, does it? Who knows, it might become your favorite. Pressure sensor technology is pretty sophisticated on this brush, so it can tell when you’re overdoing it and warn you to back off. The pulsations and oscillations slow right down when you press on too hard.
The manufacturers claim that the brush has been built to tolerate 500 mbar of water pressure. I don’t know how much pressure that is, but it sounds like it’s pretty watertight, so you can assume that the brush is going to be still going long after your braces have been taken off, and keep cleaning your teeth for a long time to come.
Like other models from Oral-B, this brush claims to remove 300% more plaque along the gum line than a normal manual toothbrush, which is reassuring. With the Bluetooth App it gives you the motivation to keep up with your teeth cleaning routine, and it helps you to focus on making sure that you clean your teeth properly for the right amount of time. While the Oral-B 7000 is a more expensive brush than some others, it still offers great value cleaning for brace wearers and the promise of greater longevity.
The product comes with three brush heads, a 2-minute timer, smart coaching via the brushing App, visible pressure sensor, and travel case. Everything you might need to ensure that your teeth remain spotlessly clean during the time you are wearing braces.
Oral-B Pro 1000
The Oral-B Pro 1000 might seem like a bit of a surprising choice for brace wearers, given that it is one of the very cheapest brushes in the Oral-B range, and that it offers the fewest features. But perhaps that isn’t too surprising given that it still removes up to 300% more plaque along the gum line (compared to a manual toothbrush) than its more expensive stablemates. It achieves this thanks to the 16° angle of its cleaning bristles, which allow it to clean deep between the teeth and between the fixings of braces, and it has the 3-D cleaning action that comes with many of Oral-B’s brushes. They call it 3-D because the head moves in 3 different planes, so it effectively attacks plaque and food material from 3 different directions and at high speed.
The single mode, the daily clean mode is enough to give teeth an excellent clean, and its pressure sensor is a useful addition to this budget electric toothbrush, as it helps you to protect your teeth from your own overeager brushing. It does also feature the Pro Timer, which stutters every half a minute to let you know when you need to move your brushing to the next quadrant of your mouth. It also tells you when you’ve reached the 2-minute deadline recommended by dentists.
It may be cheap and cheerful, but this brush is a definite contender because it does what it needs to. So, if you are a brace wearer who doesn’t want to break the bank, you should consider buying the Oral-B Pro 1000 electric toothbrush.
Sonicare ProtectiveClean 6100
Another great brush for those with braces is the Philips Sonicare ProtectiveClean 6100. It’s a feature-rich brush that cleans well and is also kind to your gums. It looks good too, which doesn’t hurt, but one of its best features is the 3 brushing intensities, low, medium, and high. You can select the one that feels right for you and not has to worry about over-brushing, and is also a good way to ease yourself into brushing if this is the first time that you’ve owned an electric toothbrush. If you do over brush then the handle vibrates to remind you to slow down, which is good to know.
Brush heads are paired automatically thanks to something called Brush Sync technology, which is a chip in the brush head that talks to the handle and tell it which one you just attached.
The ProtectiveClean 6100 also has 3 brushing modes called gum care, clean, and white. If you attach the Optimum Plaque Control, Optimal Gum Care, or Optimal White heads (purchased separately) then the handle selects the best brushing mode for them automatically. It might seem gimmicky but I think that its little features like this that you quickly get used to because they just make life that little bit easier.
The Protective Clean 6100 also features the quad-pacer and smart timer to ensure that you brush for the right amount of time. It comes with a travel case, which isn’t particularly outstanding to look at but is good enough to do the job.
Sonicare DiamondClean Smart
I need to warn you that the mighty Sonicare DiamondClean Smart electric toothbrush is only for those with deep pockets, but if you think of it as a long-term investment in your oral health then the higher price tag seems a bit easier to swallow. With a sleek black body and gold trim (on the 9700-series version) it certainly looks the part, and the build quality and features are high-end.
The DiamondClean Smart comes with 5 modes and 3 brushing intensities. It works with a smart phone App to give ongoing feedback on your brushing. It reminds you to replace the head and will handle mode-pairing thanks to Brush Sync, so it knows the best settings for each brush head that you click into place. The package comes with 4 premium brush heads, and instead of a charging stand there is an elegant looking glass for it to sit on. It comes with a decent deluxe travel case which also doubles as a USB charger.
The DiamondClean Smart claims to offer up to 10 times more plaque removal than a manual toothbrush, and it also claims to give you 7 times healthier gums in only 2 weeks compared to a manual toothbrush. For brace wearers this means that all the bases are covered in terms of maintaining your oral health at this critical time, so if you can get over the high cost then you won’t be disappointed.
Sonicare ProtectiveClean 4100
At the more modest end of the price range comes the Sonicare ProtectiveClean 4100. It is a much simpler brush but it still does a good job for people who have braces. It may only have one cleaning mode, one level of clean intensity, and the BrushSync feature is not there, but it still seems like a good option if you’re on a budget.
Even though it doesn’t have all the extra features of the more expensive brushes, it still moves the brush head at 62,000 times a minute, and maybe that’s all that matters?
The brush’s job is to get your teeth as clean as they can be, removing plaque and food debris as effectively as possible. Well, this brush certainly does that. It comes with the Optimum Plaque Control brush-head, and it feels as if it certainly does remove 7 times more ‘gunk’ from your teeth than a manual brush. Sonicare technology bubbles up the toothpaste into a cleaning foam that penetrates the gaps between teeth, and obviously that’s great for ensuring that the metal in your mouth is clean as well. In spite of the lower cost of owning this brush, it still gives you a pressure warning feature, so you won’t be tempted to press too hard while you’re brushing.
Conclusions
All of the brushes mentioned here will do a great job of getting your teeth clean while wearing braces.
If you want to give full play of the best effect of the electric toothbrush, you can select the brush heads like Ortho Care which are specially designed for the dental brace.
In the end, we will highly recommend you to floss your teeth every time after you brushed your tooth. An Air or Water flosser with the Orthodontic Tip will be significantly more effective at improving oral health in adolescent orthodontic patients than adding manual floss or brushing only.
