Brush aside restlessness with Sleepy Toothpaste

Swap counting sheep for cleaning teeth with our dreamy mint and lavender toothpaste. We’ve combined gourmand flavours with the familiarity of pre-bed brushing to help you tip the scales between restless and relaxed. Whether you’ve been taming nightmares with the kids or are stuck in a 3pm wake-up rut, a night-time brush can help you press refresh and get back to bed.

How to make a clean sweep of bedtime

As all fans of our Sleepy range will know, we’re good in bed. But the idea of expanding our famously relaxing range to toothpaste came from Lush's Group Retail Director Claire Constantine, who has a young family and suffers from broken sleep, like many parents and carers with little ones. After all, when you’ve successfully settled the children back down to sleep, it can be harder to nod back off yourself!

Claire found it helpful to fall back on a bedtime routine to reset herself for sleep by brushing her teeth. The familiar routine seemed reassuring and relaxing at three o'clock in the morning, helping her to bed back down on wakeful nights. On hearing this, Lush Co-Founder and Product Inventor Helen Ambrosen and Product Inventor Gary Shears collaborated on a product with comforting, sleep flavours that could be both refreshing and relaxing. We then rolled this out to a select group of 59 independent testers, a majority of whom reported restlessness and frequent wakings at night, asking them to try Sleepy for two to three weeks and give us feedback on how it performed in real-life, real-time conditions. 59% of testers said that using this product helped them to wind down before bed and 60% agreed they would recommend this product to friends or family who struggle to get adequate rest. With this in mind, we rolled it out to the bathrooms of sleep-deprived Lush customers.

Helen explains, “Our Sleepy category has been a huge success for Lush. The combination of lavender, benzoin, tonka and ylang ylang in our popular Sleepy fragrance has been a beautiful, relaxing blend that, along with encouraging customers to relax by bathing or showering, has made the products so effective and the category so successful. Now we’re encouraging our customers to use this Sleepy Toothpaste in the middle of the night if they’re struggling to drift off.

“The familiar routine of cleaning the teeth, winding down and gazing sleepily in the mirror, paired with this popular fragrance reimagined as a flavour will be very effective at helping you relax. It’s made with a fresh mint infusion to refresh your mouth and our in-house Perfumer Alina Gliwinska has used organic lavender oil, benzoin resinoid and ylang ylang oil to add gourmand notes of comfort food to really calm the senses. Though, because you have cleaned your teeth, you can't raid the fridge!”

Although this isn’t a children’s toothpaste, Helen also thinks that parents will particularly benefit from Sleepy this festive season.  “This Christmas, there will be a lot of parents who are up late on Christmas Eve (for one reason or another!) and we hope they will use Sleepy toothpaste to be able to settle down again before they are up early on Christmas morning too!”

Caring for your pearly whites

While the main aim of this product is to help you relax, it’s also an effective, fluoride-free tooth cleaner. We use a mild surfactant called sodium methyl cocoyl taurate, which is acceptable for oral use, and gives a gentle foaming action. This type of ingredient helps dissolve the sticky layer known as pellicle that can build up on the teeth and comes from the breakdown of food in your mouth by bacterial action. Without a gentle surfactant and the physical action of a toothbrush, this can lead to decay if not removed. Hydrated silica cleans and polishes the teeth, while calcium carbonate and magnesium stearate complete this cleansing action to leave the teeth smooth and feeling comfortable but not stripped. We also make this base with over 10% glycerine, which adds a sweetness to the base and ensures the paste is not drying on the tongue or mouth  – particularly nice if you’re waking up with a dry mouth!

If you needed any more peace of mind to help you switch off at night, independent laboratory tests confirm that this product is gently whitening and effective at tackling stains, with Sleepy making teeth 1.72 shades lighter* after the equivalent of one week's regular brushing, and 3.83 shades lighter after the equivalent of one month's brushing. 

So if you’re tossing and turning, get brushing and flossing instead  – who knows, it might just make all the difference. 

Get your teeth into Sleepy toothpaste, available now. And why not build your bedtime routine with our Sleepy range?

*Results based on tests measured against the VITA® Bleached guide industry standard shades.

Written by Milly Ahlquist