Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

tl;dr: It's real and works, but unclear whether it's better than other sanitization methods (for now...) At first I was skeptical that this would be genuine, considering all the counterfeit UV-C products out there. I was also expecting this to have a glass bulb-based UV-C lamp based on the pictures, but when it arrived and I saw that it was an LED, I was more concerned because it's hard to tell just by looking if an LED is UV-C or not. So I decided to run an experiment to test the effectiveness. The first test I did was to see if it was actually producing UV-C light, so I started with a UV-C indicator card, which glows to indicate the presence of UV and/or UV-C. As you can see in the pictures, the UV text on the card becomes visible in sunlight, and the UV-C text glows when you position the toothbrush sanitizer so that the light that escapes without bouncing around hits it. This shows that the LED is a true UV-C LED. The next experiment was to test if the UV-C light is strong enough to sanitize or kill bacteria. To do this test, I bought a few petri dishes pre-filled with agar, and designed an experiment to compare cultures of bacteria before and after exposing the swab or toothbrush to the light. Samples: Cotton swabbed sink bacteria Brand new tooth brush used for 30 seconds (a new toothbrush was used in a new quadrant of my mouth for each sample) Cotton swabbed mouth bacteria Treatments: None: used as a control to get a baseline of the bacteria 1x sanitization: The brush or swab was run through the sanitizer for the duration of 1 cycle. The side of the swab facing the light was marked and the swab was not rotated when sampling on the plate 2x sanitization: The swab or brush was run through 2 cycles of sanitization (the 1x swab was not reused for this) 3 samples with 3 treatments = 9 individual samples. The first plate was divided into 3 areas for the None treatment / control. Then 3 additional plates were divided in half to be used for the 1x and 2x treatment of each source. Once all samples were plated, the dishes were incubated upside down underneath a sous vide for 2-3 days at 90-95 degrees fahrenheit. Results: As you can see from the pictures, the control plate grew a decent amount of bacteria. The most significant results showed in the cotton swab samples of mouth bacteria. The plate of 1x and 2x treatment of the cotton swabbed mouth bacteria showed almost no growth whatsoever. The 1x and 2x treatment of cotton swabbed sink bacteria also showed a reduction in growth, but interestingly, the 2x treatment of sink bacteria shows more growth than the 1x bacteria. I suspect this is due to inconsistent amounts of liquid on each swab. More on that later. Finally, the toothbrush samples, unfortunately, show little difference after sanitization. Interpretation: From the results of the UV indicator card, and the dramatic reduction in bacteria in the cotton swab samples, I think it's reasonable to conclude that the UV-C light is doing it's job and doing *some* level of sanitization. The issue of sanitizing the brush and the inconsistency in the sink sample, however, throws a wrench into simply concluding that this works, is helpful, and worth the money. My going theory is that the UV-C light is only effective at sanitizing whatever it directly hits, and is not having an effect on sanitizing what it can't see (the space inside the brush and the other side of the cotton swab). I suspect that I picked up more liquid on my last swab of the sink, resulting in still-living bacteria migrating from the non-sanitized side of the swab to the sanitized side as I was depositing the sample on the agar. Similarly, I suspect that the bacteria that survived on the "sanitized" brush were hiding in between the bristles close to the back of the brush, and that only the bacteria on the tips of the bristles were killed. Conclusion: The LED is truly UV-C. It does kill bacteria. But due to how UV-C sanitization works, it seems unlikely that it will fully sanitize the brush, and I can't say whether this is better than any other methods of cleaning your toothbrush. Since I still have a few petri dishes left, I may design another experiment to compare different sanitization methods to see whether this brush sanitizer is comparable. But I hope for now this information is useful to those wondering if this is a genuine product.