Special Edition?

We sell kind of a lot of deeply discounted high-end fancy toothbrushes around here.

It’s not a coincidence.

But the reason definitely isn’t that we have a genuine passion for oral hygiene and a need to share that with the world at affordable prices. It’s mostly that the fancy toothbrush industry pretty often bends over and crawls up their own asses so far that they start to think people really care about one model with 27 obscure and stupidly-named features as compared to an otherwise identical model that has 29 of them.

Philips actually has a shopping comparison chart that lets you do a side-by-side-by-side-by-side-by-side-by-side comparison with SIX of their toothbrushes, this one included. What’s the difference between the Diamond Clean 9300 and the Diamond Clean 9500, do you ask? Near as we can tell, the differences include about $85 on the retail price and something they call “tongue care” but don’t explain.

Which frankly leaves us kind of torn on this topic. Because a Philips Sonicare toothbrush is a legitimately top-of-the-line way to clean your teeth. Choose literally any of them and you’ll be thrilled with the result. But why in the hell do they need more available models than a typical car manufacturer, especially when you’d be hard-pressed to tell one from the other if you had them in your hand?

We’re assuming that the short answer is money and that the long answer is moooooooooooooooney.

Either way, we’re not sure it’s really working for them, since a decent percentage of their various deluxe models and special editions wind up, well…here.

This one is the 9000-series “Special Edition” and we don’t know what the 9000 refers to or what’s so special about the edition other than maybe this is a color that you haven’t seen on one of their toothbrushes before. The marketing details promise “exceptional features” but then list things like “brush head” and “settings” which we’re pretty sure we’ve seen on every electric toothbrush ever.

It claims to remove plaque ten times better than a manual toothbrush, which sounds impressive until you see that they have a “Prestige” model that removes plaque TWENTY times better than a manual toothbrush, or twice as well as this Special Edition, if we’re doing our plaque math correctly.

But guess what? The Prestige goes for DAMN NEAR FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS and honestly, fuck it—some amount of plaque is probably good for you.

Anyway, this one is $99 and if you can get literally any genuine Sonicare toothbrush for $99 you probably should just go ahead and do that, even if you don’t particularly care about the exclusive finish.

By the way, if we ever find out that you paid a premium for any of these nonsense features, we’re going to cancel your membership here. We don’t have a lot of standards, but that seems like a good one.

P.S. There’s an app. Probably don’t use it. Do buy the toothbrush, though.