Brilliant Tooth Whitening System : Read reviews and compare prices at Ciao.co.uk

Author's product rating:

Advantages:	Cheap and not too dangerous
Disadvantages:	Tastes disgusting and can get messy

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

This summer on a pre-holiday shopping blitz I picked up products to lighten my hair and darken my skin, and after a lingering glance down the toothpaste aisle, this, the Brilliant Tooth Whitening System, to whiten my teeth. Now my teeth are fairly white anyway thanks to a smoking-, coffee- and red-wine-free life and good oral hygiene but for a few years I've chopped and changed between various whitening toothpastes. My thinking was that since I have to use the stuff anyway I may as well opt for brands that offer a little more than your general breath freshening / plaque fighting duo.

I chose this kit as it promised to be a step up from those standard whitening toothpastes, but was the cheapest of the 'proper' whitening systems at a mere £5. The kit I opted for was the small version - one week's supply - rather than the month-long one. I wasn't familiar with the brand (if 'Brilliant' was indeed the brand, and not just what the desired outcome of the teeth was) but it seemed harmless enough in as much as any bleaching product for a part of your body not normally bleached can be considered harmless.

The pack requires you to perform the following routine once daily for a week:

1. Brush your teeth

Simple enough, you use your regular toothpaste for this, and they recommend you don't brush so hard you make your gums bleed. Considering you're about to stick some bleach in your mouth, not having fresh open wounds is probably a good idea.

2. Use the accelerator

This is provided in the box and looks like one of those Vicks nasal sniffers you stick up your nose during cold season, but has a furry flat head that you use to polish your teeth. You rub this up and down and round and round each tooth you wish to whiten. Again, relatively straight forward. The problem for me came with the next step.

3. While not shutting your mouth (so as not to 'wipe off' the 'polish' just applied) prepare and insert the Duplex Tray

That's what the instructions said anyway, but not being very good at the whole keeping my mouth open, lips retracted while I tried to slick whitening paste into a mouth guard, I only attempted this once. After that I prepared the tray in advance and had it ready to stick in as soon as the polishing was done.

The tray is made of plastic and relatively comfortable but I found the grooves a bit deep and when you filled them full with the whitening paste it spilled over when you then closed your teeth around it. The paste tastes foul and having that seeping against your tongue for 10 minutes is unpleasant to say the least. To combat this I discovered you could put less paste into the grooves but doing this I was slightly worried that only the lower part of my top teeth and higher part of my bottom teeth would get whitened each time. This doesn't seem to have been the case, but at the time I did think about it. The tray is not very wide so I fail to see how it could have covered the back teeth of most people - it didn't get the last two of mine at either side and I have a freakishly small mouth for a grown up.

4. Remove the duplex tray and brush

This needs to be done carefully if you have excess paste in the tray to avoid you getting a mouthful of the foul stuff, but again that's not easy as you need to angle it out from under the teeth. After removal you brush again, this time with the special whitening toothpaste they have provided which tastes like any standard Crest or Colgate but is very smooth (with none of the fancy gritty bubbly bits you get in Sensation Deep Clean for example).

At first I thought it would be an easy program to follow, and while I wouldn't say it was difficult to get the hang of, it was a bit fiddly even when you know what you're doing and I gave up before my week was up, then proceeded to use the stuff up over several months. I have just thrown away most of the kit and am now using up the toothpaste they provide, mainly because I ran out of my usual stuff the other day and this was lying around the bathroom.

After I'd given up, I took the time to read all the instruction properly as one does when one wants to be well informed before one moans about something over the medium of the internet, and noticed that on the whitening paste it does say 'use sparingly, about 1gm per treatment' but this is a hard concept to grasp (how much does a blob of whitening goop weigh?) so it would have been more useful for them to say where to fill the tray up to, or to mark a line on the tray itself.

It's hard to say whether the kit had any effect on my teeth other than that which you'd get from brushing an extra time a day (remember you brush before and after the cycle). However I do wonder whether the effects would have been more remarkable had I had filthy teeth to begin with - the colour chart included with the pack showed me to be at number 2 on the scale pre-treatment (number 1 being Hollywood-esque) so I didn't have far to go, but some with yellowing tooths ranking at a 6 or 7 might have had more noticeable results. Perhaps because my teeth weren't that bad to start with, I gave up sooner than others might have done, but I imagine that even if you did do the whole 7 days in a row, the results would not last too long and you would soon need a top up.

I wouldn't recommend or not-recommend really as it is a product that didn't do it for me but could be right for other people with different needs or expectations. To sum up, it's cheap but it tastes rank. The effectiveness depends on your lifestyle behaviours and pre-existing teeth state, but if you are desperate to dive into the world of teeth whitening it's probably not that bad a place to start because if you do decide it's more trouble than it's worth, at least you've not spent megabucks.