Keep the sonic clean. Lose the plastic bristles.
Horse Bristle Electric Sonic Toothbrush
Horse Bristle Electric Sonic Toothbrush
Australian owned. Horsehair bristles, zero nylon.
Why it’s different
- Horsehair bristles. No nylon touches your teeth.
- The same sonic clean. 5 modes and a 2-minute timer with 30-second pacing.
- Bamboo heads. Swap one every 2 to 3 months.
- 22+ days a charge on a wireless base.
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Try it for 90 days or your money back. Returns and refunds
- American express payment method
- Apple pay payment method
- Google pay payment method
- Master payment method
- Paypal payment method
- Shopify pay payment method
- Unionpay payment method
- Visa payment method
Aussie Owned
- 90 Day Guarantee
- Insured Shipping
Less than 1% of customers claim our Money Back Guarantee
- Zero nylon
- Horsehair, never boar
- Sterilised, not bleached
- Bamboo heads
- 5 brushing modes
- 2-minute timer
- 90-day money-back guarantee
- Aussie owned
Join 400+ Health Conscious Lightsiders
The specs
All the sonic. None of the nylon.
A quick rundown of how our specs stack up.
| Feature | Lightside Sonic | Typical sonic brush | Typical bamboo brush |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bristles and head | |||
| Natural horsehair bristles | |||
| Zero nylon bristles | |||
| Bamboo brush head | |||
| Performance | |||
| Sonic vibration | |||
| 5 brushing modes | Varies | ||
| 3 intensity levels | Varies | ||
| 2 minute timer with 30 second pacing | |||
| Wireless charging | N/A | ||
| 22+ days per charge | Varies | N/A | |
| IPX7 water resistance | N/A |
Comparison reflects most mainstream sonic and bamboo toothbrushes. Features vary by model.
Full specifications
- Bristles
- Natural horsehair
- Brush head
- Natural bamboo, with a plastic connector where it fits the handle
- Handle
- Polycarbonate with woodgrain finish. Houses the motor and battery.
- Brushing modes
- Clean, White, Polish, Gum Care, Sensitive
- Intensity
- Soft, medium, strong
- Timer
- 2 minutes, with a pause every 30 seconds to switch quadrants
- Mode memory
- Starts in your last used mode
- Battery
- 2500mAh lithium ion, 3.7V
- Battery life
- 22+ days per full charge
- Battery display
- 5 LED level indicator with low battery alert
- Charging
- Wireless induction base, USB powered. Input 5V DC, 500mA.
- Charging base
- ABS with woodgrain finish
- Water resistance
- IPX7. Rinse under the tap after use.
- Rated power
- 1.8W handle, 2.5W charging base
- Head replacement
- Every 3 months
What People Ditching Plastic Have to Say
How the head is made
From a horse’s tail to the soil.
One bristle, followed the whole way: what the head is, how it’s put together, and where it ends up.
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No. 01 · Horsehair
It starts as horsetail hair.
Mongolian horsetail hair. Keratin, the same stuff as your own hair, and softer than boar. Sterilised, not bleached, so nothing synthetic touches your teeth.
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No. 02 · Bamboo
Then bamboo.
The head is a bamboo stem, where other sonic heads use a block of plastic.
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No. 03 · The head
Horsehair set into bamboo.
One small plastic connector clips the head to the handle; it’s on the label. Snap it on, brush, swap it every 2 to 3 months.
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No. 04 · The soil
Back to the earth.
Done with a head? The bristles and bamboo break down. Only the connector doesn’t.
The cost of waiting
A plastic brush sheds 2.33 million pieces of plastic a year.
That is the lab estimate for one toothbrush. Scroll through twelve months of it.
2,330,000
Plastic particles shed
One plastic toothbrush, in a laboratory brushing simulation
Month one
You won’t see it.
Most of the pieces are narrower than a human hair. They come off the bristles as they wear, and bristles wear from the first brush.
Month six
You won’t feel it.
Nothing changes in the mirror. The brush looks fine, the count keeps climbing, twice a day, every day.
Month twelve
You can stop it on day one.
Horsehair bristles shed hair, not plastic. Swap the brush and this counter stays at zero. Try it for 90 days or your money back.
Wang et al. 2025, Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety 302:118694: at least 2.33 million microplastic particles a year from one toothbrush, in a laboratory brushing simulation. Horsehair bristles shed no plastic; the electric handle is plastic and stays out of your mouth.
Why Lightside
What you get with Lightside.
Zero Nylon. Nothing synthetic on your teeth.
Most bamboo toothbrushes still use nylon bristles. Lightside uses natural horsehair on a bamboo head.
No PFAS. No Forever Chemicals.
PFAS are built not to break down, so they build up in the environment and in people. Lightside has none.
Sonic Clean. 5 Modes.
The sonic routine you know, with a 2-minute timer and 30-second pacing. Only the bristles change.
Natural Horsehair. Not Boar. Not Synthetic.
Softer than boar, and nothing synthetic on your teeth. Keratin fibre from root to tip.
100% Biodegradable Bristles
Horsehair and bamboo break down naturally. The one plastic part is the small connector where the head fits the handle.
Sterilised, Not Bleached
No bleach involved.
Shipping & Sourcing
Bear with us. We’re bringing stock to Australia.
We’re an Australian owned brand still in our early days. Right now every brush is sent directly from our manufacturing partner to your door, and we’re working toward holding stock here at home to bring delivery times down considerably.
Free Shipping
Shipping direct from our maker means we absorb the freight instead of adding it to your cart.
7 to 15 Days
Standard delivery from dispatch. Tracking can sit quiet for a stretch while your parcel is in transit. That’s normal.
Fully Insured
Every order is covered end to end. If something goes wrong in transit, we make it right.
Why it takes a little longer
A local warehouse would mean holding stock, and passing that cost on to you. Domestic freight alone would add around $11 to every order. We’d rather keep shipping free and be upfront about the trade off: your brush takes a little longer to arrive. That’s the deal, and we think it’s a fair one while we grow.
Thanks for backing a small brand early.
The Lightside Team
How we compare
Natural bristles vs the rest.
A side-by-side look at materials, treatment, and end of life.
| Feature | Lightside | Plastic brushes | Bamboo + nylon brushes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bristles | 100% natural horsehair | Petroleum-based nylon | Petroleum-based nylon |
| Brush head | Bamboo, with a small plastic connector | Injection-moulded plastic | Bamboo |
| Bristle treatment | Sterilised, never bleached | Synthetic, often dyed | Synthetic, often dyed |
| Microplastics | None from the bristles | Nylon sheds during use | Nylon sheds during use |
| End of life | Bristles and bamboo biodegrade | Not biodegradable | Bristles removed before composting |
Compared with
Bristles
Brush head
Bristle treatment
Microplastics
End of life
The evidence file
What’s so bad about plastic toothbrushes?
Eight peer-reviewed papers. What each one found, what we take from it, and where it stops. If a study cuts against us, it stays in.
Do plastic toothbrushes shed plastic?
Yes. Three labs, three methods, same answer.
A plastic brush sheds plastic as it wears. 2.33 million+particles a year, on average, from one toothbrush in a lab brushing simulation
Researchers ran ordinary toothbrushes through a mechanical brushing rig, then scaled the release to how often people brush. 63% of the debris was smaller than 100 micrometres, narrower than a human hair. New hard-bristled brushes shed fastest at first.
Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 2025 → (opens the paper in a new tab)Every brush stroke grinds a little plastic off. A horsehair bristle has none to give.
A machine did the brushing, so it can’t say what reaches your body. The authors concluded these brushes don’t directly add to health risk; their concern was the environment.
Of everything in the bathroom cabinet, toothbrushes carried the most. 30 to 120microplastic particles per toothbrush, the most of any product tested
Researchers tested six kinds of oral care product sold across India, from toothpaste and mouthwash to floss and breath spray. Every product contained microplastics. Toothbrushes held the most, and topped the authors’ projection of yearly exposure per person: about 48,910 particles.
Environmental Pollution, 2024 → (opens the paper in a new tab)Among oral care products, the brush is the first thing worth changing.
Products came from one country, and the yearly figure is a projection, not a measurement in people.
Under a Raman microscope, the debris is plastic.
The team built an imaging method to tell plastic debris apart from the other particles mixed into toothbrush material, and confirmed that toothbrushes release microplastics during use. They put the amount in the order of thousands a day, and note it varies.
Environmental Pollution, 2023 → (opens the paper in a new tab)A different lab with a different method reaching the same conclusion: brushes shed plastic.
The subject was the imaging technique, not a count, and nothing was measured in a mouth.
Does plastic end up in people?
It’s been found in tissue all over the body.
Plastic turned up in every brain, liver and kidney sample tested. 7 to 30×more plastic in brain samples than in liver or kidney, as the researchers measured it
Working with postmortem tissue, researchers found micro and nanoplastics in every sample. About 75% of the plastic in brain tissue was polyethylene, mostly shards 100 to 200 nanometres long. Brain samples from 2024 held about 50% more than samples from 2016, comparing two different groups of people eight years apart.
Nature Medicine, 2025 → (opens the paper in a new tab)Plastic isn’t just an ocean problem anymore. It’s measurable in people.
The data are associative, not causal, and the authors say so. Measuring plastic in fatty brain tissue is hard, and other scientists have questioned how high these numbers really are.
Jagged plastic fragments, sitting inside artery plaque. 58.4%of the 257 patients studied had polyethylene in plaque removed from a neck artery
Surgeons removed plaque from the neck arteries of patients being treated for artery disease. Under an electron microscope, the team saw jagged-edged plastic particles sitting among the body’s own immune cells.
New England Journal of Medicine, 2024 → (opens the paper in a new tab)This is plastic found inside human tissue, among the body’s own immune cells. That’s what moved the question from the environment to us.
Everyone studied already needed artery surgery, so it says nothing about healthy people. The paper also tracked patients afterwards; that’s an association, which the authors say doesn’t prove cause. We stop at what was found.
Is it harmful? And what’s sensible?
Not proven. Cutting easy exposures is still sensible.
Found almost everywhere. Proven harmful? Not yet. 16,000+chemicals associated with plastics. About a quarter have had extensive toxicity testing.
The review lists microplastics found in human blood, lung, liver, kidney, placenta, testis and brain. Of the plastic-associated chemicals that have been tested, 4,200 showed hazards. Only about 1% of what’s swallowed is thought to be absorbed.
Current Environmental Health Reports, 2026 → (opens the paper in a new tab)The honest answer is “we don’t know yet”. Waiting for proof is a choice too, and cutting easy exposures costs little.
The authors say evidence directly linking microplastics to disease in people is still limited, and many lab studies used doses far above anything found in the real world.
Plastic sheds most where there’s heat or friction. Heat + wearthe two biggest triggers for plastic shedding from everyday products
Reviewing kitchen and food products, the authors found measurable plastic release from tea bags, cutting boards, blenders, containers and bottles in normal use, and named eating and drinking as the main way particles reach people. Their advice: choose non-plastic options like glass or stainless steel where heat and wear are involved.
Toxics, 2026 → (opens the paper in a new tab)Brushing is friction, twice a day, in your mouth. We apply the same logic there.
It covers kitchen and food products, not toothbrushes, so the toothbrush link is our reasoning, not theirs. Its biggest numbers come from stress tests, not everyday use.
Does the motor matter?
A little, for plaque. Bristles weren’t tested.
A motor helps, modestly. 11% / 21%lower plaque index scores with a powered brush, at 1 to 3 months and after 3 months
Pooling 51 randomised trials and 4,624 people, powered brushes lowered plaque index scores compared with brushing by hand. The authors rated the evidence moderate quality and wrote that the clinical importance of the difference remains unclear.
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2014 → (opens the paper in a new tab)The motor is the part with evidence behind it, so we kept it. The bristles were never compared, so we changed those.
It compared motor against no motor, not bristle materials. About half the trials used rotating heads, and ours is sonic, so the numbers don’t transfer to any one brush, ours included.
FAQ
Answering all your questions.
Lightside uses horsehair bristles, a natural keratin fibre that is fully biodegradable, with no synthetic polymers. The only plastic in the head is the small connector where it clicks onto the handle.
Care Guide
How to look after your brush.
Natural bristles last well with a little routine care. It adds about two minutes to your day, and that’s how you know we look after our goods with love, not chemical preservation.
After every brush
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Rinse thoroughly after brushing
Rinse the head under warm running water and rub the bristles gently with your thumb to clear out any remaining toothpaste and debris.
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Dry the bristles
Shake off excess water, then give the head about 1 to 2 minutes with a hairdryer on a cool setting. Natural bristles hold moisture longer than plastic ones, and keeping them dry is the best way to keep the brush fresh and extend its life.
Between uses
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Store it upright in open air
Keep the brush head-up in a cup or holder where air can circulate. Avoid sealing it in a cap or travel case while it’s still damp.
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Keep brush heads apart
If it shares a holder with other brushes, make sure the heads aren’t touching.
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Store it away from the toilet
Keep it out of splash range, and close the lid before flushing.
Every 2 to 3 months
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Replace the head every 2 to 3 months
Swap the head when the bristles begin to splay, as you would with any brush head. The horsehair and bamboo are biodegradable; the small plastic connector isn’t.
Why drying matters
Our bristles are 100% natural, with no plastics or chemical treatments. That’s what makes them biodegradable, but it also means there’s nothing artificial keeping moisture at bay, so a quick dry after brushing does that job instead.