Can a $699 toothbrush change the world? James Dyson and son Jake break down their boldest launch yet

PARIS/BERLIN – It is a Tuesday morning, and the room is teeming with journalists, content creators and other miscellaneous characters.

The room’s aesthetic: industrial-grunge, black-forward minimalism. The brand: a multi-billion-dollar, globally recognised tech company on the verge of launching yet another revolutionary new product that is both technology- and design-forward. And the key personality behind it all: a larger-than-life figure who is also synonymous with the cultural journey of said brand. 

If the year were 2006, this could very well have been an Apple event in California, with American tech mogul Steve Jobs unveiling the consumer electronics conglomerate’s newest buzzworthy innovation. 

But it is Paris on Sept 1, 2026, and the brand is Dyson. And the driving force here is James Dyson, founder of the Singapore-headquartered engineering company. 

He is here to introduce the Dyson CameraJet ($699), a smart toothbrush that flosses while you brush, and live-streams it for you, too.

It does this via a 100,000-pixel (0.1 megapixel) macro lens camera and a special algorithm that tracks and targets gaps between the teeth. These work together to arm a jet located below the toothbrush’s bristles to spray water or mouth rinse into those gaps. 

With these unusual and high-tech features, the CameraJet could very well prove to be as revolutionary as any of Apple’s greatest hits.

But 79-year-old James is somewhat more pragmatic and grounded in his outlook on the device.

“When we launch something new like this, we don’t know whether it’ll be successful. We launch it because it’s what we want to make. If people like it and see it as being worth it, then that’s great,” he tells The Straits Times during a one-to-one interview in Paris, the day after the launch.

This is ST’s second round of face time with him, following a roundtable session with other journalists the evening before. If there is one throughline from both conversations, it is that problem-solving through engineering is Dyson’s North Star, and everything else falls into place in the name of following that. 

In this case, the problem was effectively eliminating plaque from the teeth, and more importantly, from the gaps between the teeth.

James, channelling a distinctly grandfatherly charm in a grey cardigan, says: “I didn’t floss until about five years ago, and got into trouble with dental hygienists all the time. Quite rightly. So I started flossing. But it’s time-consuming and difficult, and I wasn’t sure if I was doing it correctly or not. I don’t think I was, because my hygienist still had to deal with plaque.”

The CameraJet addresses all of those issues, he says. Its camera, algorithms, and jet work together to target all that pesky plaque within gaps, visible or otherwise. 

“Six or eight months ago, this was hitting only 60 per cent of (interdental) gaps,” he adds, of the CameraJet’s development process.  

It was important to him that the device reached a 100 per cent hit rate before it went to market. 

Pivot to personal care

In the broader scheme of things, the CameraJet seems to be as much of a left-field swerve as the Dyson Supersonic hairdryer seemed to be in 2016. Or perhaps not, when you consider its founder’s ethos of solving daily annoyances that no one else has figured out – and the fact that the Supersonic is now widely considered to be the pinnacle of a hairdryer, inspiring numerous copycats and derivatives. 

“Overheating the hair (was the flaw we were trying to address), which no one else seemed to care about. But we cared about it,” says James.

“If you got close, it didn’t overheat, which is what happened with other hairdryers (because of) weak airflow. As you placed other hairdryers near your head, they struggled to blow the air. The airflow would reduce, and heat on the hair would shoot up.

“So that was the first problem we solved. Then we solved the whole balance issue that you got with those typical top-heavy designs, by making it smaller.”

And then, he adds, they began adding sensors. The current generation of the Supersonic, the 2024-released Nural, has a sensor that automatically adjusts the temperature to ensure it remains optimal and does not damage the scalp. 

The form factor has also changed quite a bit from the original, he notes, referring next to the 2025 launch, the Supersonic r, which is shaped like the small “r” it is named after. But this, too, came out of that problem-solving ethos.

“We were trying to make it lighter in the hand, and more balanced. I like it, but professionals really love it. Though we have had a little trouble explaining to people that even though it’s smaller, it is just as powerful as the original,” he says with a laugh. 

Continuous reinvention

Will the CameraJet revolutionise oral hygiene the same way the Supersonic did for haircare?

Where James is unfazed by notions of changing the world with his company’s inventions, his son and heir apparent, Jake, is more bullish about where he sees the CameraJet in the pantheon of Dyson innovations.

“There was the first DC01 dual cyclone vacuum in 1993. Then the Supersonic hairdryer in 2016. And now there’s this. (They’re all) big, disruptive, landmark moments of blowing industries apart,” the 54-year-old tells ST in Berlin, a few days after the CameraJet’s global launch in Paris.

The younger Dyson – who is the company’s chief engineer – is in the German capital to reintroduce the CameraJet to a separate group of journalists and curious onlookers, and launch a host of other upcoming Dyson products, including a new variant of the Corrale hair straightener, the Corrale CoolShine ($449).

Jake, James’ second son, joined the family company in 2016, after finding success with his own lighting business, which was acquired by Dyson in 2015. When asked what personal touches of his are in the new suite of products, Jake points to the new Corrale CoolShine straighteners. Launching in Singapore on Sept 22, these incorporate heat pipe technology from Dyson’s SolarCycle Morph lights.

The copper heat-extracting pipes located within the Corrale CoolShine’s removable cooling attachment contain a tiny drop of water that works to draw heat away from the hair while the product is in use. This means hair is cooled down even as it is styled; a fact which Dyson says allows for better and longer style retention, up to 29 per cent less heat damage, and up to 154 per cent more hair shine. 

“Dyson engineers’ ability to think about airflow, and then take it from a hairdryer into straighteners, and then into curlers, is extraordinary,” Jake says. 

“Once you’ve done one thing, you see (other possibilities). It’s a roll-on effect. And now we’re looking at other things like that hot brush, which has some very clever needles on it,” adds Jake, referencing the new Airsmooth ($329), the brand’s first dedicated hot air brush which launched in Singapore on Sept 8.

It is armed with two different types of bristles that reduce snagging and minimise frizz – features which allow for a smoother and more natural blowout, as this reporter experienced during a styling session in Paris. 

So if the Airsmooth hot brush and Corrale CoolShine straighteners are a natural follow-through of work done on the Supersonic hairdryer, how could the CameraJet toothbrush be built upon in the future?

There is potential to marry data from the toothbrush with dentists in the future, to improve consumers’ oral health, Jake suggests. “The toothbrush is slightly different. It could open up what I might call a line of communication.”

For instance, users could choose to have data from their toothbrush remotely sent to their dentists. “What’s interesting about vision systems and artificial intelligence is that the system and infrastructure they create become bigger than the product. It’s like (Apple’s) iTunes or iCloud. It becomes more powerful than the device.”

In fact, vision systems are one potential arena Dyson might continue exploring. “In this case, we can use the camera to detect an interdental gap, with the help of 470,000 teeth images and artificial intelligence to make it really accurate. So if we’ve used the camera in a toothbrush (in this way), what other products could we put it in?” 

He believes strongly in broadening the definition of what a Dyson product is. “It was only four or five months ago that I sat down (with key business leaders) and said: ‘Listen. We don’t have enough. There’s no fuel. We’re focused only on the things we’re doing now, and we need to explore, to expand into diverse categories, and to disrupt other categories.’” 

That sense of discovery really expanded in the last four or five years, he adds. “Before, they were just looking at filtration in a vacuum cleaner, for example.  Now, of course, they’re looking into hair, they’re looking into gums. And then they think: ‘Hang on, maybe we should go and look at this other thing as well’, in case that presents a new product opportunity.”

Succession planning

Jake is encouraging this sense of possibility and curiosity within Dyson’s inner culture too. 

When asked to reflect on his first decade with the company, he says: “I think I have changed something quite significant over the last six months to the last year. Formerly, we were very set on how we do things. There were rules around creative (campaigns) or advertising, for example. It was all about the engineering, showing the engineering,” he says. 

“And in consumers’ eyes, it got a bit dull. It lost its personality, its flair, its excitement, its aspiration for the brand.”

Now, energy, personality and fun are back on the table, he says, as well as “bringing the engineering magic to life (in how we present our offerings)”.

“It’s what we did right at the beginning when the company started, but it then died off.” 

As he speaks about pushing the envelope of what Dyson can do, and centring cool creativity in the brand, the Apple comparison once again springs to mind. Certainly, the younger Dyson seems to share some qualities with Jobs: both are commanding, magnetic figures in person and onstage, giving a strong impression of being driven and no-nonsense.

But where Jobs was often described as abrasive, there are moments where Jake echoes his father’s wry British warmth.

When it is brought up that Dyson’s newly-announced air purifiers resemble the giant sandworms from science-fiction live-action film anthology Dune (2021 to 2026), Jake finally cracks a smile and agrees that the products’ blush finish makes the resemblance more striking.

Though his son is poised to take the helm of the company, James remains very involved in day-to-day operations.

“(James and Jake) are both very passionate about the CameraJet,” Rich Bacon, Dyson’s head of new product development, tells ST after the launch event in Paris. 

“We’ve had very frequent conversations with James about the product all the way through… he’s probably our No. 1 (test user). I’ve had a number of e-mails from him (about it).” 

After much trial and error, James is finally happy today to put his full weight behind the CameraJet. “Since I started using this about a year ago, I’ve been twice to the dental hygienist.  She had nothing to do. She just polished my teeth because there was no plaque,” he says.

But he is even more effusive about Jake’s presence and role in the family business.

“I’m very lucky (to have him on board). He has the right ethos: he’s an engineer and designer, and loves spending his time on all that, like I do. Hopefully (the eventual transition) will be seamless, but I’m very proud that he’s come in and done what he’s doing.”

Info: The Dyson CameraJet and Airsmooth are available from all Dyson stores and dyson.com.sg, while the Corrale CoolShine will be available from Sept 22. Dyson is hosting a CameraJet pop-up at B4 Ion Orchard from Sept 12 to 27, 10am to 10pm, with product demonstrations to showcase the engineering story behind the smart toothbrush.