Braun ORAL-B Triumph 5000 D 32.546.5/X Smart Guide /833994

I’ve always had good teeth but I’m never complacent and know how important it is to look after them. I always stick to a good dental hygiene regime and about a year ago I decided my toothbrush could do with an upgrade and spent ages trying to figure out what would be the best buy. In the end though my mother went out and bought me this Oral-B Triumph 5000 which was being touted as the best of the best. The RRP is around £180 but she paid £89.99 for it on sale, and it seems to always be on sale somewhere so you should never have to pay that much for it.

The toothbrush comes with a charging stand, 3 brush heads, a travel case and a ‘Smartguide’. The charging stand is very useful because it not only houses the brush and charges it, but also has a covered storage area for 4 brush heads. This is great if you’re sharing the brush with other people or use more than one kind of head, because you can simply swap the heads over and not have to worry about where to put them.

The brush itself is very simple to operate, with 2 buttons and a digital display. The first, larger button switches the brush on and off, whilst the second, smaller button switches through the different brush modes. The digital display simply shows the battery charge level. Personally I think this is a completely unnecessary gimmick just to push the price of the brush up, as it could just as easily have a simple LED indicator like many other appliances.

3 different brush heads are included. The first, called Sensitive, is just a normal brush head with bristles all the same length and is designed to be gentle on teeth an gums. The second, called FlossAction has bristles of different lengths and 4 little rubbery bits to simulate flossing, for outstanding interdentally cleaning. The third, called ProBright, has bristles of different lengths and a little rubber ‘cup’ in the middle, and is designed to whiten teeth by removing surface stains.

The brush also has 5 different brushing modes to choose from, including polish, massage, sensitive, daily clean and deep clean. It automatically starts off in daily clean mode, making the assumption that you would choose to use this every day. You can then cycle through the other modes by pressing the mode button. Personally I don’t find the daily clean, which lasts for 2 minutes, leaves my mouth feeling clean enough and so I tend to use the Deep clean which lasts a minute longer, but this means I have to cycle through all the different modes every time as it is the last one it comes to.

The brush heads push on and pull off very easily, and they come with different coloured rings to attach to the bottom of them so if you’re sharing the toothbrush you can identify which head is yours by the colour. The whole of the brush is fully waterproof which makes it really easy to clean, and as long as you rinse it after each use it doesn’t get clogged up.

I do find that the brush cleans very well no matter which head I use, though personally I prefer the FlossAction heads as I feel they do give a more thorough clean and get rid of and prevent build up of plaque that the others leave behind. I now only use the FlossAction heads which cost around £18 for a pack of 4, but I usually buy them when I spot them on offer for around £10. All of the brushes have at least some blue bristles which fade to white over time to alert you to when you need to change to a new head, which is useful. There is no denying that electric brushing is far more effective than manual brushing and this brush is no exception.

It charges pretty quickly, though I’ve never timed it, and the charge lasts for several uses if I leave it off the charging stand, but I do generally leave it charging whenever I’m not using it, as is advised in the manual. I’ve had the brush over a year now and it still functions perfectly, having also survived quite a few drops from height onto my tiled bathroom floor.

The Smartguide I feel is another gimmick used to push the price up as I don’t really find it useful. The only reason I really still have it on is that it’s a digital clock when you’re not using the brush, so it’s handy to have in the bathroom. The Smartguide basically acts as a visual aid to tell you when to change to brushing a different quadrant of your mouth, counting down the seconds as they go by, as well as alerting you if you’re brushing too hard. This may be helpful for children but for the rest of us it’s unnecessary as the brush vibrates to tell you when to change quadrants anyway, so you don’t really need to see the info on a screen. It’s also battery operated which is a bit of a pain, I haven’t bothered replacing the batteries in mine since they ran out a few months ago.

All in all I do think this is a fantastic brush, but I would argue that it would be well worth checking out other Oral-B models without the added extras that make the price of this one so high, as they all use the same brush heads so I would imagine they’d give the same results at a much more reasonable price.