The rise of Big Toothbrush: how did our mouths become such a lucrative market?
Animation: Pig Meat/The GuardianHealthThe rise of Big Toothbrush: how did our mouths become such a lucrative market?People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that cost up to £600. Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisisEmine SanerTue 22 Sep 2026 00.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many people would be giving as Christmas presents: the electric toothbrush. For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end.
- ▪Animation: Pig Meat/The GuardianHealthThe rise of Big Toothbrush: how did our mouths become such a lucrative market?People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that c
- ▪Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisisEmine SanerTue 22 Sep 2026 00.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many pe
- ▪For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end.
The Guardian — Tech publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under tech. We currently carry 127 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — Tech |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/sep/22/the-rise-of-big-toothbrush |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:00:34 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T04:13:50.409Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T04:13:50.409Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 7jS29N_oufGF · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
All hail the Big Toothbrush! Animation: Pig Meat/The GuardianHealthThe rise of Big Toothbrush: how did our mouths become such a lucrative market?People in the UK are more interested in oral health than ever - and you can now buy prebiotic toothpastes and brushes that cost up to £600. Yet we remain in the midst of a serious dental crisisEmine SanerTue 22 Sep 2026 00.00 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleA December 1969 report from the consumer magazine Which? explored a relatively new gadget that, it predicted, many people would be giving as Christmas presents: the electric toothbrush. For those who hadn’t yet seen one, the magazine described it as “not that much different in principle from an ordinary brush – you have a stick with a brush on the end.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Tech.
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