Category: teeth

Why: For the sake of my patients, I like to try new things. Oth­er­wise you would­n’t catch me using some­thing like this.

What: My Mag­ic Mud brand whiten­ing tooth­paste fea­tur­ing acti­vat­ed char­coal, coconut oil and ben­tonite clay. “Brush Like a Boss.”

Dura­tion: 1 month (4 weeks exact­ly)

What it looks like:

Pic­tures:

Day 1

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Pros:

1. “Nat­ur­al” whiten­ing with vis­i­ble pieces of the char­coal made from coconut shells.
2. Tastes and smells good. When I first used it, my mom walked by and said that the air fresh­en­er I used was nice. I did not use any air fresh­en­er.
3. Since it made every­thing black in my mouth, if I missed any­thing, it would high­light those areas after rins­ing

Cons:

1. Pos­si­bly abrasive…whenever I used it, there were spots where my tis­sues would feel raw and rough. I mean, you can see the pieces of char­coal.
2. The direc­tions say to use a gen­er­ous amount because since it’s most­ly made of clay, it “could pos­si­bly” dis­solve in your sali­va.
3. Made a mess every­where. Black teeth, black sink, black tooth­brush, black face, black tongue. Pos­si­bly even stained my gran­ite where it fell on there
4. No flu­o­ride. I tried to use the ACT rinse as a sup­ple­ment and flu­o­ride var­nish from work
5. Eas­i­ly knocked off my tooth­brush. Too often I squirt­ed it onto my tooth­brush only for it to end up in the sink or on the gran­ite top.
6. The tube need­ed super­hu­man strength to squeeze with one hand in the begin­ning and again at the end of its life. Only for #5 to hap­pen.

Con­clu­sion:

In short: I hat­ed it. I hat­ed using it every sin­gle day of the 4 weeks I used it. Hon­est­ly, this was prob­a­bly the worst hygiene month I’ve had in a very long time. I hat­ed the tex­ture in my mouth, I hat­ed how run­ny it got and would splash out of my mouth into a mas­sive black mess every­where, I hat­ed that it would end up in the sink and not stay on my tooth­brush, I hat­ed that it made every­thing black, and I hat­ed the absolute most that it did NOT make my mouth feel clean what­so­ev­er. The instant I start­ed brush­ing with it, I want­ed it out of my mouth. In fact, the aver­age brush­ing time for me this month was prob­a­bly 10–20 sec­onds when the norm is 2 min­utes. On top of it, because I hat­ed it so much, I pre­ferred to use man­u­al over elec­tric because then I did­n’t have to keep it in my mouth for so long.

It does­n’t foam and I knew that so I was­n’t expect­ing it, but dang it hav­ing the tooth­paste dis­solve almost instant­ly into a dirt slur­ry in my mouth is ter­ri­ble.

In regards to the clean­ing pow­er, I feel like it would be more abra­sive than my reg­u­lar tooth­paste. I spent so lit­tle time brush­ing with it, it’s hard to attest to the pow­er of it’s clean. How­ev­er, I can say that I would brush my gums by acci­dent and it would con­sis­tent­ly leave such a raw area wher­ev­er it hit the tis­sue. Kind of scary. I even thought I was rolling the tis­sue mar­gins much more than nor­mal. The whiten­ing por­tion of it? I don’t know. You be the judge. As for me, I almost felt like it was doing the oppo­site of whiten­ing my teeth.

I went back to my reg­u­lar tooth­paste half an hour ago and what a treat to be using my beloved, non-black, foam­ing, flu­o­ride tooth­paste again! They actu­al­ly feel clean and I brushed for a good amount of time.

Sum­ma­ry:

I hat­ed it, per­son­al­ly, and would not rec­om­mend it at all. In fact, I did­n’t even fin­ish the tube and will throw it away. Thank you.

writ­ten 11/2017

After watch­ing com­mer­cials tout­ing the “reduc­tion in bleed­ing gums” this tooth­paste promis­es, we got some sam­ples at work so I thought I’d give it a try before rec­om­mend­ing it to peo­ple or to answer ques­tions patients might have.

So, first off, the active, “mag­ic” ingre­di­ent here is stan­nous flu­o­ride. All den­tal pro­fes­sion­als know the effi­ca­cy of stan­nous flu­o­ride in rem­iner­al­iz­ing tooth struc­ture. How­ev­er, we’re also all well aware of the unfor­tu­nate down­side: extrin­sic stain­ing. I assume that GSK is claim­ing gum bleed­ing reduc­tion because flu­o­ride has some antibac­te­r­i­al prop­er­ties. Their answer to the stain­ing prob­lem comes from the ingre­di­ent: pen­ta­sodi­um phos­phate. It’s sup­posed to noy only reverse the stain­ing effect of stan­nous flu­o­ride but make your teeth even whiter than before using Paradon­tax.

Ok, so I try this. The first thing that struck me was the over­whelm­ing minty taste that set my mouth to feel­ing like it was burn­ing and stayed with me for over 3–4 hours after­wards. Let me say here that I have a VERY poor tol­er­ance to spices and spicy/hot foods. Oth­er than that, it was a tooth­paste. 3 days lat­er, I found my tis­sues slough­ing off, com­mon when I use pow­er­ful tast­ing tooth­pastes. Well, one monyh has passed and I have tak­en pic­tures of my teeth every Mon­day after the morn­ing tooth­brush­ing rou­tine. Same light, same bath­room, same phone cam­era. The only thing I switched up was what kind of tooth­brush I used (I have 3 that I alter­nate amongst).

Aaaand here are the pic­tures!

I’m think­ing maybe there is a slight increase in bright­ness or white­ness of my teeth between the 1st and 2nd Mon­days but after that, noth­ing over­ly dis­tinct. My tis­sues did­n’t bleed often to begin with so I can’t attest to any of that, though if you look at the pic­tures you might be able to argue that the papil­lae seem less puffy towards the sec­ond half. Some of that could just be light­ing, angle or even flossing/brushing tech.

Ver­dict: would I rec­om­mend this to my patients? Sure. I would­n’t not rec­om­mend it. Then again I gen­er­al­ly rec­om­mend any­thing a patient likes and enjoys using.

As for me, I shall be return­ing to my nor­mal toothpaste…actually… I’m start­ing my next tri­al run: the Venus White whiten­ing sys­tem by Hereus for the next 7 days or so.