In this guide, we will walk you through all of the different materials and form factors that tongue cleaners come in and explore all of the pros and cons of each.

What Materials Are Tongue Scrapers Made Of?

Modern toothbrushes are generally made out of plastic and floss is usually comprised of teflon or nylon. When it comes to tongue cleaners, however, it may be daunting to stick a strangely shaped tongue scraper fashioned out of metal into your mouth for the first time. To help put you at ease, let us familiarize you with all of the materials most tongue cleaners are made out of.

Plastic Tongue Scrapers

Pros: In modern times, plastic is the preferred material for a tongue scraper as it is affordable, pliable, gentler on the tongue, and easily replaceable.

Cons: The disadvantages of plastic for tongue scrapers is that they generally need to be replaced every 3 to 4 months similar to the lifespan of a toothbrush. Make sure to properly recycle them to do your part to preserve our environment!

Copper Tongue Scrapers

Pros: Copper has long been the primary material used for tongue scrapers in Ayurvedic and traditional Indian medicine practices. Tongue cleaners fashioned out of copper usually have a u-shaped form factor connected to metal or plastic handles. The EPA has identified copper as an antimicrobial metal that kills most bacteria on its surface within a few hours.

Cons: One major drawback of copper tongue scrapers is their susceptibility to tarnishing if not properly cared for. After use, you must completely dry it before storage or oxidation will discolor the copper. Proper sizing and cost are also factors to keep in mind when opting for a copper tongue scraper.

Stainless Steel Tongue Scrapers

Pros: Similar to the copper variety, medical grade stainless steel tongue scrapers are durable and long-lasting. Unlike copper tongue cleaners however, stainless steel tongue cleaners are resistant to corrosion and do not present the same risks of heavy metal toxicity that copper does.

Cons: Like copper, a stainless steel tongue scraper is more expensive than its plastic counterparts. Metal tongue scrapers generally are more rigid and have a fixed shape so will not work for every tongue size and shape. When shopping for a metal tongue cleaner, you will need to try out many different brands and designs to find the one that conforms to your tongue.

Various Tongue Scraper Shapes and Sizes

Rigid U-Shape (Metal)

Metal tongue scrapers typically come in a curved U-shape with metal or plastic handles.

Pros: The rigid U-shape of metal scrapers allow you to move the scraper forward without simultaneously bending the device. This might be preferable for severely uncoordinated individuals or people who have extremely low finger strength and dexterity.

Cons: Conversely, the rigid, fixed shape of metal cleaners require you to perfectly size the device to your tongue. If the tongue scraper is too wide or narrow for your mouth, it will be difficult to reach the back of your tongue and hinder bacterial buildup in the deeper recesses of your mouth. Metal also isn’t the best tongue scraper for travel as they are bulky and have a fixed shape.

Flexible U-Shape (Plastic)

A flexible plastic tongue scraper typically is a flat plastic strip that can be bent to mould to the shape of your tongue.

Pros: Because plastic strip tongue scrapers are flexible, they provide a gentler, more custom experience when moving the scraper forward on your tongue. They are also compact and easy to store and carry with you when traveling.

Cons: When shopping for a plastic scraper, avoid ones that are too thin or have sharp, jagged edges as they can damage your tongue. The perfect plastic tongue cleaner should have adequate thickness, a smooth edge, and enough pliability to form around any tongue size.

Shameless plug: Our Ultimate Tongue Cleaner hits on all our requirements for tongue scrapers: smooth glide across your tongue, flexible enough to mould to any tongue shape, and rigid enough to effectively remove tongue debris in a few passes.

Shaver-Shaped With Handle

This type of tongue cleaner resembles a shaver with a handle and a straight or curved head.

Pros: This variety of tongue scraper is fairly compact and take up the same amount of toiletry bag space as a standard razor. The shape of this scraper allows you to operate it with only one hand.

Cons: Due to the narrow width of such scrapers, many more passes of the scraper are required to clean your tongue. The propensity to trigger a gag reflex is also at play as well as the danger of choking because of the way the shaver-shaped scraper is inserted into your oral cavity.

Tongue Brushes

Probably the least efficient and sanitary of the three options, tongue brushes typically consist of a brush of toothbrush-like bristles attached to a handle.

Pros: Tongue brushes are about the size of a toothbrush with a wider head and are about as portable. You can typically store a tongue brush in the same manner as a toothbrush when traveling.

Cons: Tongue brushes take many more swipes than a traditional tongue scraper and may irritate your tongue and taste buds after continued use due to their rough surface. Tongue brushes also are more difficult to clean as the bristles provide a convenient hiding place for the removed bacteria and food particles to accumulate in.

When It Comes to Tongue Scrapers, You Do You!

Everyone approaches their tongue cleaning and oral hygiene routines in a different way and there is no one-size-fits all product that will work for all people. Make sure to try many disparate types of tongue scrapers and stick with the one that works best for you. Nothing is more important to building a lasting hygiene routine than finding the optimal product for YOU!

Set and stick to a solid tooth brushing routine

It’s the simplest way to keep your teeth in good condition. Toothbrushes help to remove food debris and plaque. Plaque will degrade enamel and eventually cause cavities. Regular brushing also helps to prevent gum disease as well. Your daily dental routine and good dental hygiene will pay dividends in the future. Flossing is also an important part of dental health. You can use regular floss or a water flosser to keep the areas in between your teeth clean. Getting rid of food debris in between your teeth and gums will help minimize the risk of cavities forming.

Add Mouthwash and Gum to Your Routine

Rinsing with an antibiotic mouthwash can also reduce oral infections and reduce plaque formation. Along with your brushing and flossing routine, rinsing your mouth for 30 seconds with mouthwash twice per day can be beneficial to oral health. There are many options for mouthwash, some of which included fluoride for cavity prevention. If you have issues with dry mouth, a mouthwash with no alcohol is recommended. Another suggestion for improved oral hygiene is to chew gum. Sugar-free gum can help stimulate saliva production.

Avoiding Sugary Drinks and Foods

Avoiding foods that can cause cavities is also an important part of a healthy oral hygiene routine. Acidic foods, orange juice, and sugary drinks will damage tooth surfaces. Drinking water instead will prevent cavities and be better for your overall health. Sugar sticks to the tooth’s surface and eventually will damage your teeth. If you can’t avoid sugar, make sure to at least gently brush your teeth with fluoride toothpaste for two minutes or rinse your mouth afterwards as part of your care routine.

Enjoy Your Healthy Teeth and Gums

Once your oral health routine is perfected and you have dialed in your morning routine and night oral hygiene routine, you will get to enjoy the benefits of pristine breath, no cavities, and healthy gums. Good oral care is vital to your overall health and your dentist will thank you.

In this article:

• The History of Tongue Cleaning
• The Benefits of Tongue Scraping
• Is Scraping Your Tongue Safe?

The History of Tongue Cleaning

Despite its relative obscurity in modern Western society, tongue scraping has had a long and storied history dating back to ancient times. Cleaning of the tongue has been practiced for centuries by a vast number of cultures and religions spanning Asia, Africa, Arabia, Europe, and parts of the Americas.

The ancient Romans considered tongue scrapers a crucial part of their hygiene toolkit. The natural practice of medicine in India, Ayurveda, has recommended the daily removal of toxic material from the tongue for thousands of years. Early Buddhist scriptures stress the importance of cleansing the mouth and tongue to ward off “evil” odors. Even Victorians in the 18th century included tongue scrapers in their toilet kits to refresh their mouths after meals.

Despite this rich history, scientific research has only recently brought to light in modern Western society the many extraordinary health benefits of tongue scraping which we will explore in this article.

The Benefits of Tongue Scraping

We brush our teeth twice a day. We are highly encouraged to floss daily and some of us go the extra mile and rinse our mouths with mouthwash. Yet, for some reason, most of us completely neglect that large, important muscle sitting in our mouths responsible for speech, digestion, and proper breathing: the tongue!

For thousands of years, the Ayurvedic practice of tongue scraping, Jihwa Prakshalana, has stressed the importance of daily removal of harmful toxins and bacteria from the tongue’s surface to promote overall health. Let us examine some of the beneficial outcomes of incorporating tongue cleaning into our daily routines.

Better taste perception

The tongue is the organ responsible for your sense of taste so it absolutely makes sense that taking care of it would improve how well you process taste sensations. The tongue is covered by thousands of taste buds that contain sensory cells that let you experience sweet, sour, salty, and bitter tastes. When our tongues become coated with a layer of food debris, it dampens our ability to fully process the entire spectrum of tastes.

According to a 2004 study on the impact of tongue cleaners, regular tongue scraping resulted in a significant reduction of tongue coating and noticeably increased taste sensation. This suggests that tongue cleaning can refresh your palate and allow you to experience stronger flavor profiles.

Remove Bacteria on the Tongue

The human mouth is a complex microbiome comprised of hundreds of different types of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. These organisms coexist together in a delicate balance of beneficial and harmful microorganisms in your mouth and can be viewed as a microcosm for the general health of your body.

Beneficial oral bacteria promote a healthy environment in your mouth and help produce nitric oxide which is vital to stem cells in repairing and replacing damaged cells. Harmful bacteria and fungi, when left unchecked, can cause periodontal disease, tooth decay, oral thrush, plaque buildup, and other disastrous oral maladies.

Much like the balance between the light and dark sides of the force in the Star Wars universe, it is vitally important to our oral and general health that we maintain a natural balance between “good” and “bad” microbes in our mouths.

That is where tongue cleaning comes in. While it is impossible to permanently eliminate all “bad” bacteria and microbes from our mouths, it is vital for us to bring balance to our mouths by practicing daily oral hygiene.

Everyone knows that food debris gets lodged in and between our teeth when we eat and that the natural solution to this is brushing and flossing. But did you know that odor-causing anaerobic bacteria lives and thrives in the papillae of the tongue and are responsible for a plethora of oral disease?

Tongue scraping directly battles these ill effects by removing this “bad” bacteria, as well as food debris and dead cells, that accumulate on the tongue. A 2014 crossover study on the effects of tongue cleaning show that even after 3 days of tongue cleaning noticeably reduced the amount of bacteria coating the tongue.

Combined with brushing, flossing, and other recommended oral hygiene techniques, cleaning your tongue can help root out and eliminate any potential hiding places in your mouth for harmful microbes.

Helps Get Rid of Bad Breath

The back of your tongue is a difficult place to reach with your toothbrush during your daily oral hygiene routine. Unfortunately, it is also the perfect, oxygen-deficient place for anaerobic bacteria like mutans streptococci and lactobacilli to thrive and produce unpleasant, smelly sulfur compounds that lead to halitosis (bad breath) and gingivitis. These types of bacteria hide in the papillae at the back of the tongue and interact with food particles to contribute to bad breath.

A Brazilian study on halitosis, revealed that tongue scraping, in combination with brushing and mouthwash, could effectively remove the bacteria at the back of the tongue and consequently improve breath issues.

Another 2004 study showed that the unique shape of specific tongue cleaners were much more efficient at removing bacteria than simply using a toothbrush.

Improved oral hygiene

While the sticky film of bacteria known as plaque is commonly known to build up on your teeth and gums, it can also accumulate on your tongue and similarly degrade the quality of your oral health.

This coated or “hairy” tongue acts as a safe haven in the mouth for the same bacteria that cause gum disease and cavities. Removing this bacterial film on the tongue not only helps prevent dental and gum disease but also promotes faster healing of oral injuries.

Better Digestion

A randomized crossover study in 2018 postulated that tongue scraping benefits included noticeable improvements in digestion and bowel movements. In the study, a group of adults aged 20-60 started incorporating tongue cleaning into their daily routines for a period of 4 weeks. After the study period, the test subjects reported numerous positive improvements to body condition and digestive ability.

The researchers suggested that this result was due to how tongue scraping has a direct connection to how satisfied you feel after eating. By scraping off the coating on your taste buds, your sense of taste will increase and you will be able to fully appreciate the food you consume.

This leads to you only eat the necessary amount to achieve the feeling of fullness. Without an excess amount of food to tax your digestive system, there will be less of a likelihood that some of your food goes undigested and negatively impacts proper digestion.

Improve Overall Health

Oral hygiene is inextricably linked to the total overall health of your body. If harmful bacteria is allowed to build up in your mouth and then swallowed, it will continuously strain your immune system. The ingested toxins and bacteria act to suppress your immune system by overloading and overworking it to fight off the constant flow of bad microbes entering your gastrointestinal tract.

Thus, routine brushing, flossing, and tongue scraping is vital in minimizing the bacterial load that your body and immune system need to deal with on a daily basis.

Is Scraping Your Tongue Safe?

Like any other activity, tongue scraping is absolutely a safe activity as long as you do it properly. Let’s address some of the concerns people may have about cleaning your tongue:

• Taste bud damage: As long as you are employing firm yet gentle pressure when tongue scraping and not aggressively rubbing on your tongue, there should be no danger of damaging your taste buds. Your taste buds can only benefit from the tongue bacteria being removed from them.
• Tongue lacerations: It is important to make sure your tongue scraper does not have any sharp or rough edges that can potentially cut your tongue. When choosing a tongue scraper, you want to find one that has an even edge that is smooth enough to safely glide along the surface of your tongue.
• Gag reflex: Given how far back on the tongue you need to place the tongue scraper to effectively clean it, some people may experience gagging when tongue scraping for the first time. It is important to ease yourself into the practice and gauge your own, comfortable sweet spot on your tongue to initiate the tongue scraping process.

The Benefits Speak For Themselves

At this point in the article, it should be abundantly clear how beneficial to your health cleaning your tongue can be. With rising health care costs and a plethora of health concerns piling up in modern society, every little action we can take to improve our overall health can prove to be priceless.

A complete oral cleaning routine consisting of brushing, flossing, rinsing, and tongue scraping is cornerstone to your overall health efforts. It is never too late to add a healthy habit to your daily morning ritual and take advantage of all the potential benefits scraping your tongue can offer!