We Were the First Editors to Try the New $499 Dyson Toothbrush

01.09.2026, 12:45 allure.com

682. That’s what I have been calling Dyson’s latest launch ever since the three numbers were whispered to me last spring at the company’s campus in southwest England, where I was the first journalist to see and (briefly) hold it. A few weeks ago, I learned the product’s actual name, but still never dared utter it. And though I know I must now type it out, I do so with some fear that these extravangtly secretive engineers will seize my assets and perhaps one of my children. But here goes: CameraJet.

As the name does not suggest, the CameraJet is a $499 electric toothbrush. Although calling this an “electric toothbrush” is kind of like introducing the Airwrap in 2018 as a “curling wand.” A bit of an understatement. Yes, this tool has a brush head that you put in your mouth, and yes you plug it in. But it’s also a camera and a water jet and can simultaneously brush and floss your teeth.

To be clear, though, the CameraJet isn’t a Dyson innovation designed to speed up a tedious process—like, say, blow-drying your hair or ridding your home of dog hair—it’s actually about slowing us down. Because the average American, and Brit, brushes for about 45 seconds (far from the recommended 120). Only about one-third of us floss daily (and that’s self-reported so… consider the reliability of your own self-reporting).

If oral hygiene could be as seductive (and effective) as a see-through vacuum or a hair-dryer with a hole through its head, maybe more of us would do all the things we know we should be doing?

Behold $499 of teeth-cleaning power.

It’s been a decade since the company best known for sucking up hair balls and dust bunnies blew with great force into the beauty business. The Dyson Supersonic Hairdryer was $400 and looked like Thor’s hammer. Arresting for sure, but c’mon how many people were actually going to pay that much for a hair-dryer? Turns out, a whole lot of people.

The Supersonic was certainly a departure for Dyson but it was all about air and these are the vacuum people. The CameraJet, however, doesn’t suck air in, or blow it out. Its key element is water—or, ideally says the brand, mouthwash (and the one sold to you by them). The toothbrush’s handle has a small reservoir built in that you fill, at the press of a button, with mouthwash (from a larger reservoir in the dock and charging station) before each use. Then, as you glide the toothbrush along the surface of your teeth as you normally would, a jet nestled under the brush head propels the fluid through the gaps in your teeth to rinse away plaque before it ever has a chance to calcify (I now know we all have a three-day window).

You could call the CameraJet an electric-toothbrush-Waterpik hybrid. But please don’t. “Waterpik is not a pleasant sensation,” says Sir James Dyson when we connect on Zoom a few weeks after I visited his Cotswolds base. Based on my admittedly limited encounters with water flossers (Waterpik being the “Kleenex” of them), I tend to agree. The overall experience for me has been one of pressure-washing my teeth, with an intensity that my gums do not enjoy. The Dyson folks tell me that that’s because most water-flossers use what they describe as a “needle jet”—a thin piercing stream of water—to remove plaque. The Dyson jet is designed to emit a fan-like spray so it covers more surface area and focuses less pressure in any one spot. The brand also claims that this sweeps away plaque rather than just blasting a hole through it, more effectively eradicating the sludgy bacteria.

The sonic oscillation of the bristles keeps them in constant motion so they don't stall against your teeth when you're not moving the toothbrush.

So that’s the jet situation—what about the camera? Underneath the jet that is underneath the brush head is a camera the size of a pencil tip (as well as an LED light—it gets dark in a mouth). Its 100mm pixel macro lens captures 28 images per second in order to guide the jet to the gaps in your teeth. This flosser doesn’t emit a continuous stream of fluid into your mouth or require you to push a button every time you want to spray between your teeth. Instead, as you brush, the camera is looking ahead to see where each tooth begins and ends, then telling the tool when to fire. This targeted flossing is why the CameraJet’s reservoir can get away with holding less than half an ounce of fluid. (For comparison, the tankless Waterpik Cordless Plus holds seven fluid ounces in its handle; the handheld Philips Sonicare Cordless Power Flosser 3000 has an 8-ounce reservoir to accommodate a 60-second cleaning session.)

The camera also serves another purpose: It lets you record what’s happening inside your mouth as you brush. The toothbrush is Wifi and Bluetooth enabled so, through the Dyson app, you can either observe in real-time or have a video to enjoy—perhaps with your dentist?—at a later date. (This may sound to you like a nightmare of next-level privacy invasion, but according to Dyson, these videos are not stored on the app or in the cloud.) If you just want to see what’s going in your mouth—why does that crown feel funny? is that a canker sore?—you can turn on the camera, but not the brush, to have a look. And if you’re thinking what I’m thinking: yes but at your own risk. Even Sir Dyson has experimented with the camera’s other potential uses: “I've shoved it in my ear and it was very interesting. You get a very, very good image in your ear. But I’m not allowed to talk about that.”

At the touch of a button, the docking station refills the toothbrush's reservoir with mouthwash in three seconds.

Sir Dyson is, however, allowed to talk in detail about the hurdles involved in engineering a camera that’s embedded in a toothbrush. And they were high. “The camera is on a brush head that's moving about a thousand movements a second. So the camera's moving and you're taking a film. Never mind the fact there's a lot of water in the way,” he says from behind a large desk in an undisclosed location. “There might also be a bit of foam—although we've got a non-foaming toothpaste. But I mean, imagine trying to take a film with something that's making a thousand movements a second. It’s a serious problem.”

And one, among a few others, that took Dyson engineers almost a decade to solve. The idea first arose nine years ago, and they spent six years working on the CameraJet—that’s one more than the bagless vacuum cleaner that debuted in 1983 or the hair-dryer that blew us away in 2016.

On top of the moving-camera-foamy-dark-mouth challenge, there was the plaque challenge. In order to test prototypes again and again and again, the Dyson team needed access to plaque that they didn’t have to wait for human mouths to generate. There were some existing “proxy plaques” created for this purpose, but Dyson didn’t think they were a close enough approximation of the real thing. So they developed their own, in partnership with Singapore University. (England is home to Dyson’s lab and university, but it moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2019.) That alone was a five-year process. But worth it, says Dyson engineer Niamh Turney: “We could do hundreds of iterations of a brush head and test them all on fake plaque and optimize without having to do a clinical in-mouth trial every time.”

That big hair-dryer looks fun and chill, but once you cross the threshold of the Dysonplex, there are a lot of rules.

All I was allowed to see in this mirrored building was myself.

The 50-acre Cotswolds campus, in a town called Malmesbury, is in part an actual campus—the education kind. Turney is one of several young engineers (many of them women I will note) that I met there who had graduated from the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology. It opened in 2017, and was given the power to award degrees in its own name in 2020. Students at DIET—about 30 to 40 are accepted each year—don’t pay tuition and earn a salary while completing a program that’s two days per week of classroom instruction and three days working on a Dyson engineering team. Turney’s first job after graduation was on the Airwrap team—“I learned everything there is to know about hair science,” she said. And now she knows more than she thought possible about plaque.

In addition to modular dorms, there are many large glass buildings in the Dysonplex (as Allure’s former senior writer Brennan Kilbane dubbed it after his own visit six years ago). There is also one that is mirrored on the outside, so I can very clearly see myself—beige trench, hair frizzed from the rain—but not even the slightest shadow moving inside. The building that I am allowed to enter with my press armband contains a room that 3D prints prototypes of Dyson works-in-progress; an area equipped with rigs testing the curl patterns and dry times of hundreds of wefts of hair; and a mostly echo-free chamber where engineers fine-tune the sound volume and frequency of every Dyson tool. “Acoustics are part of the premium experience,” explained Sophie Harold (another DIET grad) as we stood in a room whose walls and ceiling are entirely covered with large sound-absorbing foam wedges. In the middle of the space was a single Supersonic dryer suspended on a boom arm and surrounded by microphones. Harold said this is where Sir Dyson recorded his audiobook.

Also on campus (and accessible to me): a free employee hair salon and a cafeteria serving Dyson produce and meats. Perhaps you didn’t know that Sir James Dyson is the largest British landowner outside of the royal family? Dyson Farming is among the top five producers of wheat grains, malting barley, oil seeds, peas, and potatoes in the United Kingdom. (The barley and sunflower seed oil are used in some of Dyson's hair products.) It also grows about 1,250 tons of strawberries every year, which were often heaped in a bowl on conference room tables in Malmesbury (at least for this journalist).

I was permitted to photograph the strawberries but little else at the Dysonplex. The inner workings of these bu