5 Homemade Toothpaste Recipes Put to the Test

By Philip Schmidt, Hometalk

When you stop to think about it, conventional store-bought toothpaste does leave a lot to be desired. It’s very foamy, it’s sickly sweet and it’s loaded with stuff most of us aren’t familiar with, like sodium lauryl sulfate. Of all these characteristics, it’s the last one—chemical content—that most anti-toothpaste crusaders object to. They’d rather soap up their choppers with something they know and trust, such as baking soda. For those who aren’t so distrusting of the American Dental Association and the products it endorses, a homemade toothpaste recipe might just be a good fallback for when you run out of the brand name stuff that’s usually in your bathroom.

But before we get to the results of the “tooth cleaning experience,” please be aware that none of these recipes is presented here as a recommendation—not for fighting cavities nor oral hygiene nor improving your love life. And definitely do not use any of these concoctions on a child’s teeth without the express consent of your pediatrician. If you really want to clean your own teeth with homemade paste for the long term, please get the go ahead from your dentist first.

Toothpaste #1

Recipe:

Plain baking soda

Mix powder with a bit of water to create a paste.

Experience:

Extremely salty, gritty, and generally not so nice. Leaves the mouth feeling clean but adds a faintly metallic finish to the teeth.

Notes:

Good ol’ baking soda really has been proven to clean teeth, which is why it’s a popular additive in commercial toothpastes. It’s also the main ingredient in virtually every homemade toothpaste mix (although there are some real doozies out there, such as one made exclusively with herbs; summer teeth, anyone?). Don’t use an old box of baking soda that’s been sitting in your fridge absorbing odors for the last year or two, no matter how desperate you are.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Anna N.

5:38PM PDT on Apr 3, 2012

These sound way too much like recipes for cleaning products... I think I'd rather start buying ready made toothpastes that avoid SLFs and all those other harmful things in conventional toothpastes.