You have been telling patients to floss for years, and so has every clinician before you.
Around 70% of the UK population still does not do it.[i]
At some point, the question becomes about whether the tools we have been recommending can really work for most of them
The evidence suggests not: string floss demands a level of manual dexterity that many patients find difficult to sustain. And unlike brushing, where the tools have improved, flossing has remained essentially unchanged for decades. The compliance issue has nothing to do with motivation; it’s design stagnation.
When the tool changes
Insight presented at the British Dental Conference & Dentistry Show 2026 by Dr Ali Golkari, researcher at Queen Mary University of London, offered a useful perspective. Electric flossing technology, when designed correctly, can perform strongly across both the contact point and the embrasure space – the two key areas that interdental cleaning must address. Many alternative methods favour one over the other. A device that reaches both, with a low dexterity requirement, removes the barriers that might cause patients to give up.
The Tahir Electric Flosser was developed with exactly this in mind. Its rechargeable, one-handed design delivers sonic vibration to disrupt plaque at and below the contact point, with replaceable floss heads that require no threading, no finger contact, and no difficult-to-use technique. For those who have tried and abandoned string floss, this is a different category of experience.
The numbers
Compliance data for interdental cleaning products is almost universally disappointing. A method that patients start and stop within a month will achieve nothing. One of Tahir’s aims is to make low flossing compliance a thing of the past by offering superior convenience.
One patient had received a warning of advanced gum disease and began using the Tahir Electric Flosser on the recommendation of their clinician. “At twelve weeks my gums had stopped bleeding, returned to a healthy pink colour, and were no longer spongy.” This is the expected outcome when it comes to regular interdental cleaning; the unexpected part is such a positive compliance outcome.
A new idea; a new solution
Tahir Oral Care is a British oral care company founded by Stefan White, someone whose own experience of Crohn’s disease, and the painful mouth ulcers that came with it, made conventional flossing inaccessible. This gave him both the motivation and the insight to develop an alternative. The brand is currently conducting a 1,000-patient randomised controlled trial with Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry.
It’s the number one selling oral care brand at Harrods. It launched at the Dentistry Show London 2025 and sold out across two days. And Stefan’s stated goal – to reduce the proportion of non-flossers in the UK from 71% to 50% in his lifetime – is one that every dental professional in the country has a reason to get behind.
The tools are changing. Let’s watch the statistics change with them.
The Tahir Electric Flosser is available for patients at tahiroralcare.com and through Harrods. For practice enquiries and professional ordering, visit tahiroralcare.com
[i] GOV.UK. Adult oral health survey 2021: health-related behaviours. GOV.UK. Published January 25, 2024. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/adult-oral-health-survey-2021/adult-oral-health-survey-2021-health-related-behaviour
