Oral-B Genius 9000 review

The Genius 9000 is considered Oral-B’s first proper “smart” toothbrush, making use of built-in Bluetooth connectivity and a companion smartphone app to help users brush as a dentist recommends. It gives you a live update of where you're brushing, as well as feedback on how well you're brushing.

Oral-B claims the Genius 9000 can kill up to double the plaque of a boring old manual toothbrush, giving you cleaner teeth, healthier gums and fresher breath, thanks to six brushing modes, which include deep clean, sensitive and whitening modes. 

But does Oral-B put its money where its mouth is with this super smart toothbrush? We stick the Genius 9000 in our gob (that's a mouth, for our American readers) to find out.

• Best electric toothbrush

Oral-b Genius 9000: Price And Availability

The Oral-B Genius 9000 was first launched back in April 2016 but is still available to buy today. Even almost five years on, it’s considered to be a great quality electric toothbrush, which might be why it hasn’t come down in price all that much over that time. 

When it first hit the market, it cost a whopping £300 / $300, but even then there were probably very few people who actually paid the full asking price. No-one really seems to know why, but you’ll almost never pay full price for a toothbrush. Manufacturers have got into the habit of suggesting a ridiculous RRP that’s always double what retailers sell them for, even at launch.

Nevertheless, the Genius 9000 currently retails for around £150 / $130 from most online retailers although different colours come in at different prices, oddly. The colours currently available are, Black, White, Rose Gold and Purple.

In the box you get the toothbrush handle, a charging travel case, four brush heads and a smartphone holder – the latter is so you can stick your phone to the mirror to more easily view the app's graphical feedback. Oh, and Oral-B also chucks in a 30-day money-back guarantee and two-year warranty as standard.

Oral-b Genius 9000: Design

The Genius 9000 is a good-looking toothbrush, especially the midnight black edition, which boasts a nice, sleek design. At the end of the day, though, it does still look like any other Oral-B toothbrush out there, so there’s nothing too innovative here design-wise. 

We were kind of expecting more for that large asking price. Still, the light-up cleaning modes, battery notification and the LED red pressure sensor in the handle (called MouthGuard tech to notify you if you’re brushing too hard) are clever additions over previous Oral-B toothbrush designs and work well. It also feels nice and light in the hand.

Oral-b Genius 9000: App And Connectivity 

After first unwrapping the Genius 9000, you'll want to download the Oral-B app, which syncs with the toothbrush and gives you feedback for improving your tooth-brushing technique. Once the app is downloaded and it finds the Genius 9000 via Bluetooth, simply brush as you usually would, twice a day, and all your data will be synced on your connected device.

You can choose to have the app open while brushing, or simply sync all the data every couple of days or so and look at your feedback retrospectively. The former is recommended as real-time training is better for understanding where you are going wrong when brushing. Here you can also choose from your six brushing modes to find one that best suits your oral care needs. These are: daily clean, deep clean, sensitive, whitening, gum care, and tongue care and can also be chosen physically by the button under the power button on the toothbrush handle. 

What we particularly liked about the app was the Position Detection mode. This uses the front-facing camera of your connected smartphone to make sure you’re brushing all of your teeth by dividing your mouth up into six zones - left, middle and right for both the top and bottom rows. 

While the camera tracking could be more accurate, it was still fun to see the animated graphics as we brushed, along with the achievements and trophies that encourage good habits. We probably used this app for around a week before the novelty soon wore off. Still, we definitely feel like it helped reinforce good brushing habits that we still use even when not using the app, so it served a useful purpose in that respect.

Oral-b Genius 9000: Cleaning And Performance

So how does the Genius 9000 perform when it comes to actually brushing your teeth? 

Well, Oral-B employs a 3D movement cleaning system, which basically means they use oscillating/rotating/pulsating technology. The round brush head pulsates to loosen plaque and then oscillates and rotates to sweep the plaque away to remove 100% more plaque than a manual brush, according to Oral-B. What's more, the Genius 9000 boasts a new Pro-Clean mode, which touts 3,000 more movements per minute than previous models. 

This means your teeth feel exceptionally fresh after each brush, especially if you have it on the deep clean setting. However, be careful as those who are prone to receding gums might find this setting to have a detrimental effect. For these users, there’s a sensitive brush option, which cleans effectively without causing any damage to sensitive gums.

If you’re not using the app as a guide, there’s also an in-built timer while brushing to ensure you brush for the length your dentist recommends (two minutes). This notifies you every 30 seconds with a short vibrate when to focus on the next “quadrant” of your teeth. This helps remove the guesswork from cleaning, and ensures you don’t get bored and give up too early. There are also several longer-term programmes you can follow, for whitening, gum health, breath problems and more.

One negative thing we will say is that the Genius 9000 is obnoxiously loud. If someone overheard you using it they're likely to think you’ve taken to your gnashers with a power drill, heaven forbid. 

As for battery life, we found that the toothbrush warned of a low battery after around 25 brushes then did 3-4 more before running out of juice altogether. So that’s about two weeks of use between charges. And the good news here is that unlike older Oral-B electric toothbrush models, the Genius 9000 uses a lithium-ion battery, meaning you can charge it whenever you like without the risk of diminishing the battery life.

Oral-b Genius 9000: Verdict

While it’s not the most expensive thing you can put in your mouth (who’s tried invisalign?!) the genius 9000 is still pretty pricey for a toothbrush, even a smart one like this. Still, it’s not like you’re not getting your money’s worth of features here. It might not pack as much tech as Oral-B’s newer AI-enabled iO brush, but costing much less, it’s still a great option if you’re looking for a smart toothbrush that won’t completely destroy your bank balance.