Brusha, Brusha, Brusha

I have fallen in love with my new toothbrush. Yes folks, it has come to that, where a toothbrush has assumed a priority spot in my affections. This is a recent phenomenon, actually as of last Saturday when I purchased said toothbrush.

I don't know if you have been toothbrush shopping lately (or if you still live in a cave), but it's daunting. I remember the day when there was only one style per manufacturer, and they came in soft, medium and hard. Try to get a hard these days and you are out of luck...bad for the gums say all the dentists. So the options in the soft (my choice) and medium bristles are about a thousand. Remember, not only do you have to choose your brush strength, you get to decide what color and head options (more on that later) you prefer. This assumes you know (or care) about anything other than getting the yucky stuff out from between your gums.

Well, by looking at these photos on the side here, you get the idea of how far toothbrushes have come. The original tooth cleaner was an aromatic stick that was chewed until it became brush-like on one end, and the other end was sharped to a point for the ever popular picking of the teeth. This was about 3000BC, or you can see pretty much the same behavior on CBS's Survivor since they are only able to bring one personal item, and you can see they don't choose to bring a toothbrush.

The bristle toothbrush was not invented until 1498 in China where they used the household boar's neck hair and attached it to a bamboo stick, hence we have the boar bristle brush. Of course, the nylon bristle brush was introduced by Dupont de Nemours in 1938, and called Dr. West's Miracle Toothbrush. I bet it was called a miracle brush because all the bristles didn't end up stuck between your teeth as I remember they frequently did when I used a boar bristle toothbrush as a kid.

I know you were riveted by the above paragraphs, but I just couldn't resist. If you should want to pursue the subject further you may go here, here and here. There really are an extraordinary amount of web sites devoted to the history of the toothbrush.

I'm running out of steam writing about my toothbrush, so you won't get the full details I promised. But I will say that even though the thing looks like you would never want it in your mouth, the soft squiggly arms on the edge of the criss-cross bristles feel nice on my gums, and the handle is so big it's easy for me to hold - the manufacturer's are definitely thinking about the boomers with this design. Oh, did I mention it does a bang up job in the cleaning department too.