We commonly get asked questions regarding the optimal order in which to perform the various strategies we teach for oral hygiene to stop tooth decay, get rid of bad breath, and halt the progression of gum disease.
Questions like, “Should we brush first and then floss or floss and then brush?” and, “when should I use the tongue scraper?” are among the many versions of this question.
Knowing what sequence in which to practice the various oral hygiene techniques can be dizzying, especially for those new to navigating this path to optimal oral health.
In this article we will share the oral hygiene sequence we have found that best supports us along our path to optimal oral health (and why).
You see, these kinds of questions tend to skip over the information that we consider of primary importance. Instead, they jump straight into the technical details.
Of course, what oral hygiene habits we practice do matter and how we do them (the order in which we do them) also helps us optimize our oral health. However, why we do something and how we do it are generally more important than what we do.
Let’s take the simple practice of brushing our teeth to demonstrate an example. We believe that understanding why we brush and how to brush are of greater importance than what tool we brush with. We detail the greater importance of this ‘why/how/what’ issue in our 2 part series on ‘Are electric or manual toothbrushes better for optimal oral health?‘
So, with the relative importance of brushing and flossing with conscious awareness in place, let’s figure out together the best sequence to help navigate to optimal oral health.
1. Brush first
Why should we brush first?
Two reasons, really.
First, most of us already have a strongly ingrained habit of brushing. It’s easier to ‘attach’ other habits to an already existing habit. So, start with brushing, then add other strategies after brushing. That way, we ‘get the ball rolling’ by modifying a habit we’ve already established.
The second reason to brush first is to clean the biggest surfaces, the teeth and along the gum line, first. Whether your focus is on disrupting thug bugs, removing plaque from teeth, or stimulating gum tissue, taking care of this important step first makes sense.
If you’d like to better grasp why brushing is so helpful, we have an article titled, “4 reasons why brushing is so important“, which answers this question well.
Also, here’s an article (with videos at the bottom) that details how to brush your teeth to reduce gum disease, a video on how to circle back and brush your teeth to stop tooth decay, and a link to our awesome Bass toothbrushes.
While we’re here talking about brushing, here’s an article that details 3 ways to keep thug bugs from growing on your toothbrush.
And last on brushing, for those of you like us who tend to ponder questions that our culture just takes as gospel, here’s a fun article that dives into how long we should brush our teeth. (A second title for this article could be ‘Whoever proclaimed 2 minutes was the golden rule for brushing anyway?)
2. Clean the tongue
Assuming you brush your teeth in the bathroom, it makes sense to clean your tongue next. Since we do need a sink to clean the tongue, taking care of this essential piece to any health-giving oral hygiene routine is the next step.
(If you don’t know why you have to be in the bathroom for this, you are in for a rude awakening when you start scraping your tongue! The gunk that comes off the tongue requires a sink nearby! 🙂 )
If you have chronic bad breath, here’s a quick, two-step tongue cleaning solution that explains how to get rid of bad breath forever.
If you want to really ramp up your ability to have fresh breath all the time, download our FREE eBook “What to do when you absolutely MUST have fresh breath” today.
3. Floss consciously
Ok, so we have the big surfaces cleaned. Now it’s time to take care of the often-neglected spaces between the teeth.
We like to floss after brushing and tongue cleaning for two reasons.
First, we want to have the bigger surfaces of the teeth clean already from brushing, then remove any plaque/food debris from between teeth. This is especially true if your mouth tends to grow plaque easily. The thinking is that when we remove plaque from the teeth and along the gum line, the plaque can be smooshed into the gaps between our teeth.
So, if we skip flossing, we could literally be packing plaque into the spaces between our teeth. Bad news for sure!
The second reason we floss after brushing and cleaning the tongue is because we often floss after leaving the bathroom. This provides us more time to floss really consciously and not feel the rush to ‘get it done’ so we can get out of the bathroom and get on with the evening.
What activity can you do for a few minutes after brushing that doesn’t require much attention while you practice conscious flossing? We tend to go sit on a couch and chat. Taking a few minutes to floss well (aka consciously) and pay attention to what the floss tells you about the state of health in your mouth is a HUGE step in the right direction.
Speaking of flossing, here are a few helpful resources on flossing. First, 4 reasons why flosser picks are not a healthy option, next, how to avoid the 4 most common flossing mistakes, and finally, our analysis of what the best flosses on the market are and why.
Also, here’s a video that explains why flossing is such a critically important oral hygiene habit, and here’s a video that explains how to floss without damaging your gums.
And for those of you who really can’t stand flossing or who find flossing difficult, here’s an article that will provide a solution to help you have healthy gums without having to floss!
4. Swish
Swishing last helps remove any plaque/debris that your oral hygiene routine just liberated from your teeth and gum line. It’s important to note that swishing contributes the least to helping to reduce gum disease risk. It’s mostly a good ‘final step’.
That said, one great benefit of regular, vigorous swishing is the exercise we gain from it (the important word here is ‘vigorous’). By actively swishing, we pump the tissues in and around the mouth, which helps them detox and function better. A traditional method of cleansing the mouth is called oil pulling. Here’s an article we dedicated to this ancient oral hygiene practice that details the benefits of oil pulling.
And if you really want to take a deep dive into the topic of oil pulling, we invite you to download our FREE Ultimate Oil Pulling Guidebook here.
To super charge your swishing and turn it into an active mouth washing step, add a drop or two of our HealThy Mouth Blend. Here’s a link to a video tutorial that shows 4 powerful ways anyone can create optimal oral health in their own lives.
Last, if you would like to learn more about the power of swishing to improve our oral (and whole body) health, here’s a video that explains how swishing our own saliva may be the most powerful step to support our oral microbiome (the bacterial environment in our mouths). We call this exercise ‘Mouth Probiotics’.
For those with advanced gum disease…
If you are currently using our HealThy Mouth System to address deeper gum pockets related to periodontal disease, we recommend that you use your OraWellness pocket applicator last. That way, you’ll have cleaned all surfaces of your mouth AND then finished by dealing with any deep pockets, leaving your mouth super clean so it can rest for several hours through the night with a very low ‘thug bug’ population density, which promotes an ideal healing environment.
In the end, what really matters most is that we:
1. Understand why oral hygiene is important
2. Clean our mouths regularly
3. Bring as much conscious awareness to the process as we can
4. Use products and strategies that have been created/formulated to really help (and not just fill a tube)
So what about you? What order do you use to have a healthy, happy mouth?
Helpful, Related Resources:
What to do when you absolutely MUST have fresh breath [free eBook]
OraWellness Ultimate Oil Pulling Guidebook [free eBook]
Are Electric or Manual Toothbrushes Better? (part 1) [article]
Are Electric or Manual Toothbrushes Better? (part 2) [article]
4 Reasons Why Brushing is So Important [article]
How to Brush Your Teeth to Reduce Gum Disease [[article & video]]
3 Easy Ways to Keep Thug Bugs from Growing on Your Toothbrush [article]
How Long Should We Brush Our Teeth? [article]
How to Get Rid of Bad Breath (Halitosis) Forever [[article and video]]
How to Create Greater Oral Health for the Whole Family “Conscious Flossing” [article]
4 Reasons Why Flosser Picks Are NOT a Healthy Option [article]
How to avoid the 4 most common flossing mistakes [article]
What’s the Best Floss on the Market and Why? [article with floss analysis]
WHY is flossing such a critically important oral hygiene habit? [video tutorial]
How to floss and NOT damage your gums [video tutorial]
What to Do if You Really Hate to Floss [article]
The Benefits of Oil Pulling [article]
How to Support an Ideal Oral Biome “Mouth Probiotics” [video tutorial]
You should floss first because that removes food particles from between the teeth in the gaps between the teeth and the gums and allows more effective access for the ingredients of the product to enter those areas.
I am religious about cleaning my teeth after every meal. I have a dozen crowns and a few old root canals 🙁 and I am concerned more about those teeth then the ones I can see. (Obviously, I wasn’t always so dedicated, but that changed several years ago and my check-ups are much better). Anyway, I follow this order because it is logical to me:
1. Swish with water to remove large food particles.
2. Use the Water-Pik (always on the lowest setting) to remove the remaining food particles not removed by swishing (I’m always amazed how much is left behind). I do this first because I don’t want to rub those particles into the gums by brushing or flossing.
3. Floss well between all teeth, sometimes twice, hugging each tooth and sliding the floss up and down a few times. Again, I do this before brushing because I don’t want the toothbrush to rub anything into the gum that the floss might get out first.
4. Use a rubber pick along the gum line to remove anything left behind — I usually pick up a tiny bit of white matter on the tip (plaque? food?).
5. Swish again…
6. Brush with an extra-soft child’s toothbrush.
7. Scrape my tongue.
8. After all that, I rinse with very warm salt water.
The whole process takes 30 minutes because I take my time to be very thorough. I don’t floss every single time I eat, just 2x /day.
Is there anything wrong with this order? I’ve considered brushing first, but I can’t get past the thought that I’ll be brushing hidden food particles deeper into the gums.
Also, regarding the advice to brush 2x/day — does that include the first brushing immediately after I wake up, or just after the first and last meals of the day? This always confuses me.
Maybe it’s because English is not my first language but I’ve read your article two times and I still don’t understand if I should be brushing my teeth first or brushing my gum line with the bass technique first. I’m pretty sure that I got it right that I should do both these things before I floss though. Thanks!
I always did it the other way round!
Damn!
Hehe, glad you find benefit from our work! 🙂
How many animals in nature brush and floss their teeth? Have you ever had any feed back from wildlife biologists and/or vets that have examined non-domesticated animal oral health in older individuals and their findings? How does this correlate with Weston Price’s findings of dental health in “aboriginal” populations? Seems to me that 95% of all dental issues are related to a humanly corrupted “unnatural” diet.
Aloha Dan,
Thank you for stopping by to offer your perspective. Truly, we couldn’t agree with your comments more!
Here’s the rub…
How many people do you know actually eat the foods we are meant to eat? Then, within that small group of people, how many of them have done the necessary introspective work to identify what of those foods humans should be eating, they can actually eat and assimilate well? (In other words, once we bring the person to the place of eating foods that humans are designed to eat, it’s up to the individual to do the work to identify what of those foods are right for them.)
If a person has gone through this process, then I agree with you, they most likely don’t need such oral hygiene steps.
However, as each of us travels along this path to reaching this ultimate place (not knowing if we will ever reach it), it may behoove us to apply oral hygiene strategies that help to address the issue ‘in the mouth’.
As a personal example, I’ve been on this path for many years now and I brush my teeth once or twice a day. I tend to give my mouth a decent cleaning in the evening before bed as a habit. But like I said, I’ve rarified my diet and lifestyle to such a place where I eat foods that most of our modern culture doesn’t consider palatable. (in my effort to eat the foods that my body requires to navigate this path optimally :).
Then there’s the factor of ‘collateral damage’ that’s already in the mouth when a person wakes up. For example, even if we could take a person and put them on the ideal diet/lifestyle to optimally support their oral health today, what’s to be done with the damage that is already in their mouth from living in the less than ideal way? Sure, superficial decay, maybe even deep decay could be reversed. But the damage from conventional dentistry isn’t going to go away from an ideal diet.
So, in the end, I still think that some level of regular oral hygiene is prudent to help each of us navigate this path. Like we often say, we encourage approaching this subject from two angles, primarily a whole body immune approach (via diet, lifestyle, etc) AND from an ‘in the mouth’ approach.
I hope that helps! 🙂 I welcome your feedback as I really enjoy discussions like this!
Thank you for providing me the platform to share on this subject with others!
I’ve had a permanent bridge for 23 years and work diligently to keep the anchor teeth and gums healthy. Bought the Ora Wellness Heal Thy Mouth blend. Would you feel is it better to use a few drops in water instead of directly on toothbrush to protect the glue holding the bridge in place? Several years ago I could feel some temporary loosening from the acid eating lots of peaches when in season. It occurred to me a while back that it could be a problem using the oil formula directly on brush so I stopped using it and just decided I might be okay diluting it more. What do you recommend?
Aloha Ellene,
Thank you for reaching out to us.
I see no reason why using our Healthy Mouth Blend would weaken or in any compromise the strength of your bridge work. Frankly, even if you found that it got loose (which it will not from using our blend), what that would mean to me is that the bridge anchors were weak already and in need of care.
Our Healthy Mouth Blend will not compromise the adhesive holding your bridge in place or any fillings.
That said, you are welcome to dilute the blend if you prefer. Although we have the formula strategically positioned to be strong enough to help yet not so strong as to potentially stress sensitive gum tissue, some customers prefer the blend a bit mellower and do dilute it.
Really, it’s up to you. You’re the captain of navigating your path to optimal oral health. We are honored to be among your guides and helpers to assist you along this path! 🙂
Hi there!
thank you for such great information
do you someone here in Hawaii who can treat cavitations?
thanks again!
Aloha Mike,
Please reach out to us directly via email and we may be able to steer you in a helpful direction. You can email us through the home page on our site.
Thank you!
I usually oil pull before i brush and floss…so should i oil pull after i brush and floss?
when brushing and flossing rinsing in between the steps is ok before swishing?
Aloha Beverly!
Thanks for stopping by to ask these great questions!
Yeah, after I wrote the article I pondered about whether I should have included when to oil pull in the info. 🙂
Depending on when you oil pull, I would tend to oil pull first, if it’s in the morning. But really, what’s more important is that we do practice regularly those habits that we find benefit from. Yes, definitely ok to rinse between steps!
Aloha!
I have several questions:
(1) Have you heard of the Phillips blotting technique and what do you think of it?
(2) What do you think of applying a nano silver gel 10ppm to your gum line morning and night which seems to have helped firm up some loose teeth for me anyway?
(3) Have you heard of brushing your teeth with pearl power for remineralization or do you know of something other than this that works for this purpose?
Looking forward to hearing back. Thanks, Linda
Aloha Linda,
Thank you for stopping by to ask these questions.
Yes, we are familiar with the Phillips blotting technique. It’s a good strategy, just like the Bass brushing technique we teach. Bottom line, figure out which technique works for you and go with that. Personally, I prefer Bass method as it makes more sense as a massage than the blotting technique to me. Just less invasive feeling mostly.
Nano silver gel makes good sense. It’s going to be effective in addressing bad bugs and as a gel, may have better ability to hang around the gum line.
I am familiar with pearl powder for remineralization. It makes a little sense to me. Mostly marketing from my perspective. We are planning to share a LOT of info on remineralization soon, so stay tuned! 🙂
Thanks for asking!
Aloha