How many times a day are your teeth under attack?
You brush twice a day. Most people are under attack nine times.
Seven questions, sixty seconds, and a number almost nobody has ever been asked for — not by a dentist, not by a toothpaste ad. It predicts your next filling better than how well you brush.
Every time something that is not plain water goes into your mouth, your teeth come under acid attack. Within minutes the pH at the tooth surface drops below the line where enamel starts giving up mineral. It stays under for about a quarter of an hour, and takes roughly forty minutes in total to come back.
One attack a day is nothing. Nine is a different mouth entirely — and the number is almost never what people guess.
Answer honestly, for a normal working day. Not your best day.
Nothing is sent anywhere. The scoring runs in your browser and stops when you close the page.
Your score is not measuring willpower
It is not counting sugar, and it is not counting how well you brush. It counts separate occasions — plus the two habits that stretch one occasion into a long one: sipping slowly, and eating or drinking after the last brush of the day.
Occasions matter more than quantity because a single attack very nearly repairs itself. Saliva lifts the pH back over the line and carries calcium and phosphate into the surface, and forty minutes later the tooth is roughly where it started.
Two people can eat identical food, by weight, and end up with completely different mouths. One ate it in three sittings. The other grazed through nine.
So what actually happens if the number is high?
This is the part nobody spells out, and it is the only part that matters. A high score does not hurt. That is exactly the problem — by the time anything hurts, the stage where it could still be undone is years behind you.
It runs in the same order in almost everybody.
The surface roughens where you cannot see it. Stain grabs on faster, so coffee and tea start showing sooner after a cleaning than they used to. The film along the lower front teeth is back by evening. Breath fades earlier in the day than it did.
Cold starts registering. A sip of cold water, a breath of winter air on the way to the car. That is thinned enamel letting the tooth feel what it never used to feel.
And the colour changes — not because the teeth are dirtier, because they are thinner. Enamel is translucent; the dentine underneath it is naturally, permanently yellow. Less enamel means more of that yellow showing through. Which is why whitening keeps disappointing people: it is bleaching a surface whose problem was never stain.
Chalky white marks appear near the gumline, most often on the upper front teeth. Those are demineralised patches, and this is the final point at which mineral can still go back in. Most people never notice them, and no one has ever told them what they are.
The surface breaks. Now it is a drill and a filling, and this is where it stops being reversible: a filled tooth is never the original tooth again. Fillings do not last forever — they get replaced, and every replacement takes a little more of what is left. Eventually there is not enough left to fill and it becomes a crown — then a root canal, then the conversation about an implant.
None of that arrives with a warning. It arrives as a sentence at a check-up: there is a small one here we should watch.
The uncomfortable part is that the people this happens to are almost never careless. They brush twice a day, they floss, they go for cleanings. They are simply under attack nine times a day, and nobody has ever counted it with them.
And it does not stay in the tooth
An acidic mouth is a mouth where a particular kind of bacteria does well. That has consequences well beyond a filling, and they show up in ordinary life long before they show up in a dentist's chair.
The smell is not food. It is volatile sulphur compounds made by bacteria on the back of the tongue and between the teeth — so it comes back a couple of hours after every mint, because the mint never touched what was making it.
Worse, the usual answer makes it worse. An alcohol rinse dries the mouth, and saliva is the thing that was washing those bacteria out and buffering the acid. You buy the product for fresh breath and hand the problem a better environment.
Blood in the sink when you brush is not normal and is not vigorous brushing. It is inflammation. Left running, gingivitis becomes periodontitis: the attachment between gum and tooth breaks down, bone recedes, teeth loosen. Periodontitis, not decay, is the leading reason adults lose teeth. It is also almost entirely painless until late.
A tooth is not a sealed object. An untreated infection can travel out of the root into the jaw, the sinus, or the floor of the mouth. That last one has a name — Ludwig's angina — and it can compromise an airway inside a day. It is uncommon. It is also not history: it still happens, and it still starts as an ordinary tooth somebody was going to get looked at eventually.
This is why “there is a small one, we will watch it” deserves a date in the calendar rather than a shrug.
Gum disease is associated with cardiovascular disease, with worse blood-sugar control in people with diabetes, and with adverse outcomes in pregnancy. Association is the honest word: these are populations studied over time, not a proven chain from your mouth to your heart, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling harder than the evidence allows. But the association is consistent enough that it is in the guidance dentists work from.
It changes how you behave. The closed-mouth smile in photographs. The hand that goes up when you laugh. Standing half a step further back in a conversation, checking your breath before a meeting, deciding not to say the thing you were going to say. None of that shows up on an X-ray, and for most people it is the cost they actually pay, every single day, long before a dentist ever mentions a filling.
All of this runs from the same place: the acid, and the bacteria that make it. That is the front of the chain — everything downstream of a broken surface belongs to a dentist, and no spray changes that.
Now mark your brushings on that day
One before the first attack of the day. One after the last. Two points at the far ends of a line, with every attack that actually matters sitting in between — untouched by either.
That middle is about fourteen hours long. And here is the part worth sitting with: there is nothing in your bathroom cabinet that can reach into it. Toothpaste needs a sink. Floss needs a sink. Mouthwash needs a sink and something to spit into. Every one of them is built for the two moments when your teeth are least under threat.
Which is why the score is not a discipline problem. It is a coverage problem, and coverage is fixable.
SEE WHAT COVERS THE OTHER FOURTEEN HOURS€18.13 a bottle on Autoship · 60-day money-back guaranteeThe one thing built for away from the sink
CariSpray is an oral spray, and the whole design brief was that stretch. Two or three sprays across teeth and tongue, hold about five seconds, swallow. No water. No sink. No spitting. Three seconds. It fits a pocket, a handbag, a car door and a desk drawer.
What is in it is not exotic, and that is the point. Hydroxyapatite is the crystal enamel is actually built from — the exact mineral acid takes out — in a particle small enough to settle into the pits an attack leaves behind. Xylitol works on the other end: the bacteria most responsible for decay take it up as if it were sugar and then cannot metabolise it, so they make no acid from it.
Nothing to spit out means it can be used at a desk, in a car or in a meeting. That is not a bonus feature. It is the reason it works at all — a product you can only use at a sink is a product that covers two attacks out of nine.
What you actually get
What people report, and when
The first figure is a laboratory measurement. The other three are what users reported over four weeks, and they are labelled that way on purpose rather than averaged together into one bigger-sounding number.
What it costs, and why it is priced like this
On the three-bottle delivery it works out at €18.13 a bottle — about sixty cents a day, and a bottle lasts roughly a month. Something meant to be used nine times a day has to cost what a daily habit can carry, or people ration it. A rationed spray covers three attacks out of nine, which is the same as not having it.
Every order carries a 60-day money-back guarantee from the day it arrives. Sixty days is roughly five hundred of the attacks you just counted. That is long enough for the answer to be yours instead of ours — and if it is no, you keep the bottle and get the money back.
LOWER YOUR SCORE€18.13 a bottle · three seconds a time · keep the bottle either way© 2026 OralAdvance Labs · Privacy · Terms · Refunds · Contact