Oclean One Electric Toothbrush Review: It Speaks to Me

Oclean One

One Job: Cleaning your teeth

When we test products at TestHut, we want to make sure to stay focused on the most important feature within the niche. In this case, we ask the question: How well does this electric toothbrush clean your teeth?

With the Oclean One, it is easy to get distracted by its clean lines and robotic start up voice that says “Oclean” every time you push the button. But in our lab tests, the Oclean One finished just above average in plaque removal and overall power. It does a decent job cleaning your teeth, but there are better brushes out there.

It claims to be the most powerful brush on the market, but even their claimed speed of 42,000 RPM (not really rotations per minute… just vibrations but let us not split hairs) is much lower than Sonicare’s 62,000. And it was not the most powerful in our lab tests.

Their website uses lots of fancy technical jargon to try to sell this brush as something more than it is: “ micro-motors developed in conjunction with KOTL can reach a maximum operating state of up to 40,000 rpm…”

The brush offers the ability to customize many features, but with the standard Dupont brush head, the cleaning efficacy, which is based on our other electric toothbrush reviews UK, is just not as good as our best brushes.

Cleaning performance test results

Electric toothbrush cleaning performance rated from 1-5 based on test results (higher score is better).

So the brush will clean your teeth, but it isn’t the best of the best, and they should spend more time improving the cleaning efficiency of the brush instead of adding all the bells and whistles.

Unboxing

Credit where credit is due—the Oclean team does a nice job with packaging. The box has an “Apple Store” feel to it with its very white, clean lines, and just a single image of the toothbrush, also very clean and white.

Inside the box, you get the handle, the magnetic charging cable with the USB plug, a single brush head and a very long, skinny plastic travel case with the see-through cover.

It is a nice package, but we would like more than one brush head.

Look and feel

There is something about the Oclean One that just makes you want to pick it up. We were very excited to get this one in our hands and to see how it would operate.

Right away you notice the compact size and density of the handle. It feels really well built. The top and bottom are ringed with real metal accents, unlike so many other brushes which substituted steel for shiny plastic.

The shape of the handle is a bit like a bowling pin, tall and skinny with a small round base (which houses the magnetic charging rings and a built-in speaker). So this terribly unbalanced brush became quite an annoyance in our test and photo sessions because the Oclean has a habit of falling over, then rolling and taking other brushes with it. Unlike other brushes, the designers at Oclean did not add any grip points or plastic bits to keep it stable when lying on its side.

Although it is a bit more slick than most other brushes, it still feels good in the hand. I found it a bit small for me, but the other testers said it was comfortable.

There is a single, small white button surrounded by a silver ring that controls the brush. When you first turn it on, the handle says, “Oclean” in a robotic feminine voice. The brush continues to talk as you change modes and begin to brush. This is a nice gimmick at first, but it can get annoying. The good news is that you can turn it off using the app.

They have tapered the handle and brush head so that when fitted, the whole brush has a very nice streamlined shape that looks good in photos, but is a bit too tall and top heavy in practical use.

Brushing experience

In this lonely world, maybe we can take comfort in having tech gear that talks to us. Oclean took a page from the Alexa and Siri playbook by having a brush that speaks to you, but it lacks the interactive elements. Maybe the next iteration will also listen and perform commands hands-free?

As it is now, this brush is one of the harder brushes to operate. The button is a bit small, and not easy to find without looking. It has a lovely LED light behind it that glows almost imperceptibly in well-lit rooms. This is supposed to show us the charging status of the handle, but we found it almost impossible to see in regular light.

After you turn it on, you can select from four modes. These modes are not clearly marked on the handle, and they aren’t very easy to understand. There are just four white dots that light up, and to move from one mode to the next, you have to push and hold the button down for two seconds. Then the brush will announce the modes, “Level 1 cleaning… level 2 cleaning… level 3 cleaning… level 4 cleaning.” This is very annoying, but once you have your mode selected it will remember, so you don’t have to do this every time.

If you find the cleaning mode too strong, you can switch to sensitive mode using the app. But we found this to be completely unsatisfactory for cleaning. The brush just felt like dead weight in my mouth on the sensitive mode.

The vibration of the brush is powerful, but not uncomfortably so, and the noise level is one of the lowest we tested at about 56 decibels.

Battery life

One place that the Oclean truly excels is in the battery performance. They claim that this will last up to 60 days without charging. Imagine using your toothbrush and only having to charge it 6 times a year?!

We tested this claim in our lab, and it took a long time, but we actually got 63 full days of 2 minute brushing sessions out of a single charge. This brush exceeded the high expectations set by the factory claims.

Not only that, but the battery charges in just 4 hours. This is likely due to it being a magnetic charger and not an induction like most of the other brushes in our test.

The charger is very light and thin. It only comes with a USB plug, so you will need a device or adapter to plug it into. One cool thing is that the USB plug is two-way which means you can plug it in either way and it works! We aren’t sure why this miracle of USB design isn’t more universal because we were amazed after years of USB struggles!

We would like to see a charging brick come with all brushes. It is also not the most stable charging base. It is not weighted, and when the brush is sitting on it, there is a good chance that it will tip over.

We do like the magnetic effect where the toothbrush latches onto the charger, kind of like the Macbook’s maglev charger, but the magnetic base of the Oclean One also sticks to other metal surfaces, so you want to be careful around sensitive electronic devices.

Brush heads

The Oclean One came with one standard brush head which seems to be high quality. We also ordered the sensitive brush heads and tried these out as well.

The included head has standard Dupont fading bristles, but not on the sensitive model. The sensitive heads are all grey, and rather dull looking. They do have colors to match the colors of the handles, but sometimes it is hard to find the right ones in stock. We ended up ordering pink instead of white because it was all we could find locally.

They are also fairly expensive at about 4-5 pounds apiece.

What else does it do?

Oclean brushes are touted as being technically advanced. They claim to have all these features to help you improve your brushing technique, but we found that the app is not the best one on the market.

Again, we had high hopes for this brush.

Registration

Registering is simple. You put in an email and password, and then verify the email, and you can then access the app. One big complaint is the next step and that is connecting to your brush. Some users complain about getting the brush to connect to the app. One tester did have an issue with having the U.S. app with an international brush, but for users in the EU and Great Britain, this should not be a problem.

The App

The app itself is clean and pretty easy to use, but it is not as graphically engaging as the Playbrush. We like that the battery life of the brush is on display at the top at all times, and navigating through the screens is very straightforward.

Unlike some of the better apps in our tests, this one does not keep track of your brushing technique as you brush giving you real-time results. Instead, you brush, and then check the app to see how it scored your session.

The good news is that the brush does pass the couch test. In other words, if you just turn the brush on and let it run for two minutes without brushing, it knows and gives you a very low score. They say it has gyroscopes inside and monitors to track your brushing technique. That is pretty cool, but not as effective as a real-time brushing coach found in the better smart brushes we tested.

After you finish brushing, the app will update and show you how you did, giving you the duration of the session, a percentage of effectiveness rating, and also keep track of your progress in a calendar report. This is all nice, but it doesn’t really help you improve as you brush. You can try for a higher score each time you brush, but we feel the live monitor apps are much more effective.

It also can create an Analysis Report that does analyze your brushing sessions and uses some algorithms to offer advice. We could see using this a few times, but we wonder how effective and accurate the information really is?

They also claim that the brush comes with a pressure sensor, but we could not get it to engage, and the app does not warn you if you use too much pressure. We think the pressure sensor is used to see if you are using the brush, but not actively warning you if you press too hard.
It has some kind of anti-splash mode which is supposed to disengage the brush when you remove it from your mouth to prevent toothbrush splashing, and this seems to be how the pressure monitor is working.

We would like to see an actual pressure sensor to protect our gums from pushing too hard, as many of the brushes we tested have.

Features

The app does have some nice basic features. It allows you to customize your brushing sessions better than any other app. For gearheads like us, this is a lot of fun! You can create a custom mode that allows you to divide your brushing session into 6 parts and each part can be whatever mode and length of time you choose from a predetermined list. This allows you to really play with all the features the brush offers. It also comes with many premade modes to choose from to find one that works for you.

Warning, the app does not score the custom sessions in the same way as it does the premade modes, so that is disappointing.

Like most other smart brushes on the market, we do not think the app and the features are worth paying a high price for. The main goal of any app should be to get you to want to brush your teeth. We think offering reminders and incentives for brushing are the most important tools an app has to help you brush more often. This app lacks any reminders.

However, it does offer an accurate brush head usage count. You can see exactly how many times you have used your brush and reset this when you begin using a new one.

We hope that Oclean keeps at it to improve the features of the app because it seems like there is a lot of potential here!

Accessories

The Oclean comes with the magnetic charging base and a travel case.

We like that there is a travel case, but this is not one of the best. It snaps together awkwardly and is really long and thin. It will carry the brush where you need to go, but we aren’t huge fans of it.

The case is designed for the handle and brush head to be assembled, so it is also very long. The other brush cases we tested all have separate spaces for the brush heads making them a bit easier to tuck into baggage.

Long-term use and care

One problem we are having with the Oclean line is that brush heads are not as easy to get as they should be.

Sometimes they are in stock, and sometimes they are not. For our refills to continue testing, we could only find the pink ones or the sensitive ones. The original white ones were not easily available.

We hope that they solve this issue and have fully stocked brush heads in all colors available in the future. The annual cost of the brush with replacement heads every 3 months will be about 11 pounds.

The brush itself has a warranty: “Oclean promises to purchase a new machine and enjoy the 365-day warranty service. During the warranty period, all products are only replaced.” We guess this means that if something breaks within the first year, they will replace it for free, but it is hard to be sure.

Conclusion

If you like novelties and want a one-of-a-kind toothbrush, this is a pretty good one to have. It is unique, and it has its quirks, but there is something likeable about it. Overall, it cleans pretty well, but we are not happy with the user experience or the smart features. In fact, this brush might actually be a bit cumbersome to use over the long haul.

We could recommend the Oclean One solely on its brushing merits; however, there are better brushes at a lower price point than this one that will do a better job cleaning your teeth.

But no other brush will talk to you when you are feeling a little lonely!

Oclean One Features & Specs