CONSUMER

Oral care is getting a luxury makeover

Skincare? That’s so 2025. This year it’s all about the mouth. 

What's happening: Oral care is being repriced and repackaged as a consumer lifestyle category, complete with pastel colors, cool logos, and products tailor made for social media feeds. 

• The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted a growing market for premium oral-care products, including $28 probiotic whitening toothpaste from Agent Nateur, $33 Swedish mouthwash from Selahatin, $20 chewable mouthwash tablets from Boka, and French dental floss in a metallic dispenser for $14.

• The formula behind these brands is familiar: more interesting ingredients and packaging, sustainability claims, direct-to-consumer distribution, and a brand story that turns a mundane task into a wellness and self-care practice.

Why it’s happening: Oral care brands see the same opportunity in the mouth that transformed the skincare category—and the dollars that can follow when a functional product becomes an identity product.

• Consumers are already spending heavily on products promising better sleep, digestion, skin, fitness, and longevity. The mouth is a logical next frontier, particularly as awareness grows around connections between oral health and overall health.

• The category is also unusually ripe for reinvention. Toothpaste and floss have historically been marketed around clinical utility, with relatively little emphasis on design, experience, or personalization.

Why it matters: As marketing-forward consumer brands increasingly shape how people think about oral health, expect to hear more questions from patients about the trendy product de jour, from fluoride-free toothpaste to microbiome-friendly mouthwash to whitening products going viral on TikTok.

What it means for you: The Instagram-ification of oral care could create new opportunities for organizations that get ahead of it. Here are a few tactics to consider adopting in your practices:

• Curate to build trust. Cutting through marketing hype is another way for clinicians to build trust with patients. Develop an evidence-based list of recommended home-care products so staff across the organization can give consistent guidance.

• Use consumer enthusiasm to improve compliance. If a better-designed brush, portable floss product, or more enjoyable toothpaste gets a patient to use it consistently, the branding may be doing useful clinical work.

• Equip clinicians for the questions. Give dentists and hygienists simple talking points on trending ingredients so patients get consistent answers.

• Experiment selectively with retail. Higher-end, carefully selected take-home products or replenishment programs could open up new revenue streams.

Bottom line: Patients thinking more about their oral health than they used to is good news for DSOs, even if it’s consumer brands driving that attention. That doesn’t mean you need to turn your waiting area into a Sephora, but showing up with answers and guidelines grounded in the evidence is a chance to meet patients where they’re at and build trust—and that’s worth a lot more than the margin on a tube of fancy toothpaste.