Brushing your teeth has now become a very sophisticated and technological operation, with a new product launched in Japan by Shiken called Soladey-3. A great optical technology was employed in this high-tech toothbrush– the Soladay-3 toothbrush has a semiconductor embedded in its neck, and a solar panel in the foot of the grip.

The toothbrush works by electrons from the black semiconductor, when wet and exposed to any light, trying to take hydrogen ions from the acid in the plaque. The toothbrush requires only very little toothpaste, has a replacable head and comes in orange, blue, red and purple grips. The company claims that in research where a regular toothbrush and Soladey-3 were soaked in an s-mutans bacterial solution and then left in petri dishes for 48 hours, the Soladey dish showed no bacterial remains whereas the regular toothbrush’s petri dish showed a colony of bacteria.

The toothbrush is currently patent-pending in Japan, USA, Korea, China, Taiwan and Europe. Getting rid of plaque on teeth has therefore now grown from a boring daily routine feat to a futuristic scientific operation using solar panels and semi-conductors.