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?

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.

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.”

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.”

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 buildings are guarded like state secrets. As in the Central Intelligence and National Security agencies, legally wed Dyson couples (and there are more than a few) can only speak to each other about new innovations they’re involved with on a need-to-know basis. This answered my question about whether I could at least tell my husband about 682.

This hermetic secrecy is how Allure beauty director Sarah Kinonen and I recently found ourselves in the bathroom of a suite in the Aman hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue, brushing our teeth while members of the Dyson public relations team looked on. If we wanted to test this next-level toothbrush, our options were this or, to accommodate a longer testing period, another possibility was floated at some point: An Allure editor could visit Dyson’s Soho offices every morning and evening for a couple of weeks and brush their teeth there, leaving the CameraJet on the premises at all times. We landed on the hotel bathroom meeting.

After filling our brushes with mouthwash from docking station reservoirs, Sarah and I brushed our teeth side-by-side (a first for both of us professionally). And we agreed: This toothbrush is a joy to use—fun even—and our teeth felt pristine after two minutes with it. It’s lighter that we expected (just over eight ounces, or a roll of quarters), and quieter than our current electric toothbrushes and certainly than any water flosser either of us has used.

The jet makes a slight pfft sound when it sprays into each gap, but the sensation was pleasant. I had no issues with fluid overflow in my mouth, though Sarah did have a bit of drooling (our gallery of observers said this was very normal for a first-timer). Overall, the experience was dry; I would even feel comfortable using the CameraJet after applying my makeup—something I'd definitely avoid with other water flossers. Sarah and I were both impressed that the fluid flossing continues not only when the handle is horizontal but even when it’s inverted. (The reservoir is pressure-controlled so it eliminates all air pockets and will push out fluid in any orientation.) I did have an issue when cleaning my inside lower teeth—after hitting all of my gaps perfectly, the jet stopped firing. One of the people standing behind me in the bathroom said this can happen because it gets so dark in that area and suggested I open my mouth a bit. The problem was solved.

The CameraJet lets you floss and brush simultaneously, just brush (with the option of manually triggering the jet), or just floss. Sarah and I brush-flossed past the two-minute mark, and neither of us depleted our mouthwash supply. I also recently tested another brushing-fluid-flossing hybrid, the Soocas NEOS II Ultra Electric Toothbrush, which holds 1.7 ounces in its handle. It flosses for 80 seconds (after you complete two minutes of brushing). When held horizontally, however, it can’t draw from a low reservoir, so I ran out of water.

This device is an impressive feat of engineering, and we were impressed when we experienced it in action. But based on the Allure staff’s (combined) 300-ish seconds with this device, we can’t tell you that the CameraJet is ultimately more effective than using a far cheaper electric toothbrush and a string of floss.

During my time in Malmesbury, the Dyson team referenced to the internal and external lab testing that they had done on the CameraJet, which they said showed that it was more effective than the market leaders at removing plaque. But the only clinical trial data that Dyson has been able to provide to Allure is a four-week study of 60 subjects, comparing the results of a manual toothbrush and a CameraJet. The CameraJet came out on top on every metric—but the comparison seems a bit like putting a mortar and pestle up against a VitaMix. After four weeks, 17 percent of CameraJet users had reduced gum inflammation versus 9 percent of manual toothbrushers; reduction in gum bleeding was 65 percent versus 37 percent. The largest difference was in the percentage of participants who transitioned to “healthy gums” (meaning less than the 10% of the gum areas tested bled when probed): 74% versus 6%. The difference in plaque reduction, however, was far less dramatic: The CameraJet users ended with 19% less buildup, the old-school toothbrushers had 12% less.

The full receipts on this $499 investment are still forthcoming, so stay tuned for Allure's deep-dive review (with input from dental professionals) now that the CameraJet is out of the bag. It's available to the public (including us) as of today, and there will be no shortage of volunteers to take it home for far more extensive testing. There will also be no shortage of skepticism about the potential worth of a toothbrush that's the price of a 65-inch television—but remember what we said about that new hairdryer in 2016?

Six years ago, when Allure visited the Dysonplex as it launched the Corrale hair straightener, my former colleague wrote that “Dyson will conquer, or perhaps is already in the process of conquering, the world's bathroom counters.” They are now one big step closer.

The Dyson CameraJet launches on September 1, priced at $499 and offered in two colors: Ceramic Ultra Blue and Ceramic Pink. It includes a docking/charging/refill station, two brush heads, a charging cable, and a travel case. A Dyson non-foaming toothpaste and mouthwash will be coming soon.

To read about other Dyson innovations:

• Is the New Dyson Airwrap Worth $700?
• The Dyson Supersonic R Is the Biggest Blow-Dryer Breakthrough in Years
• We Tried Dyson’s New Styling Products on 4 Different Hair Types