Think Flossing Sucks? Our Favorite Waterpik Is on Sale.

If you aren’t shooting jets of water into your own mouth, are you even really living?

We all know we should be flossing. And there’s always that nagging sense of chagrin in the days leading up to the teeth cleaning appointment, knowing that the dentist is going to ask, “So, are you flossing?”

So, are you? Your gums get inflamed if you don’t, and plaque builds up between your teeth where the toothbrush bristles can’t get to. And it can make your mouth kind of stinky.

But it’s easy to put it off for just one more day, over and over. If that sounds like you, then you should get a water flosser. Right now, my favorite water flosser is on sale.

best of the bunch

Waterpik’s advertising of a 45 second supply of water is accurate, given my repeated testing of shooting full tanks of water across the room into the sink, the dog’s water bowl, and a few lucky houseplants who were just sitting around bored.

That was just long enough to floss my whole mouth. You wouldn’t want to leave water in the tank between uses anyway, since it’d get moldy and germy, so it’d be pointless if the tank were much bigger.

Waterpik says it should take about four hours to fully charge it. That’s kind of a long time, given that it has an internal lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery. Those tend to charge more quickly than nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries. But hey, you can get up to four weeks of daily use out of a single charge, so I’m less bothered by the semi-long recharge time in actual use.

As for anyone wondering whether a water flosser can do the job as well as a piece of floss, I’d say it does. Months of using one before a teeth cleaning led to a compliment from my dentist, and no blood when the dental hygienist flossed with the old-fashioned string.

Being cordless, the Cordless Advanced 2.0 is easy to stash in a drawer when you’re not using it, too, so you can’t use not having enough counter space as an excuse. Looks like you’re running out of excuses not to be flossing your teeth, so what are you waiting for?