REASONS TO BUY
Inexpensive
Good battery life
REASONS TO AVOID
Not comfortable
Large
Annoying brush head attachment
Philips Sonicare Essence Review
This toothbrush didn't impress, though it is the least expensive of the group
Philips Sonicare Essence
Credit: Philips
By David Wise ⋅ Senior Review Editor ⋅ October 11, 2018
Contributions From: Austin Palmer
RELATED: The Best Toothbrushes of 2025
Our Verdict
Finishing close to the back of the group, the Sonicare Essence is far from our favorite toothbrush. This model isn't very comfortable and didn't deliver a distinguishing performance in our cleaning test, though it does have a solid battery life and is quite easy to use. It is the least expensive toothbrush of the group, but it isn't that much more expensive for a much better toothbrush. Additionally, the replacement brush heads for this tend to be a bit pricier than other models, so you may not even end up saving that much — or any — money in the long run.
Our Analysis and Test Results
This toothbrush finished right behind the Colgate E1 and the Oral-B Pro 5000. This brush is less comfortable to use than both of these and cleaned worse than the Pro 5000 in our tests. However, it does have the best battery life of this group and costs significantly less than either of the other brushes.
The brush heads for the Essence are substantially larger than the competition.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Comfort
Most of our panel found this model to have an acceptable level of comfort during brushing, but the lack of a soft or gentle mode was a disappointment for those with sensitive gums.
This model was exceptionally noisy for a side-to-side style brush, both as measured by the sound level meter and in the opinion of the testers. We recorded the Essence at 73 dBa, 2" away from the mouth when being used for brushing. This was substantially louder than the other side-to-side style brushes and on par with the rotation-oscillation style. Our panel also agreed that this brush seemed like one of the loudest, both for the person brushing and for other people in the same room.
This brush also lacks a built-in pressure sensor. Additionally, it is by far the largest and heaviest toothbrush, making it quite a bit more cumbersome to hold compared to the other models.
Cleaning
Most of our testers did a passable job at removing plaque from the easier to reach places, but most people definitely missed spots in the hard to reach areas.
This noticeably included teeth towards the back of the mouth, with most of our testers' molars still showing residual plaque after brushing with the Sonicare Essence.
Though being substantially larger and heavier, the Essence was surprisingly comfortable to hold.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
Ease of Use
The Essence lacks cleaning modes, with only the single, standard clean available. While this model does have a two-minute timer, it forgoes the quadrant pacing function, leaving it up to the user to ensure evenness in brushing throughout the two minutes. The large size of this toothbrush makes it exceptionally stable, standing tall above its competitors, even when subjected to extreme table shaking.
The Essence is one of the most stable freestanding brushes that we reviewed.
Credit: Jenna Ammerman
The interface is limited to a simple on/off switch, as there are no other features to interface with. When attempting to clean this brush, we found there were a few places where toothpaste gunk would accumulate, including the seam where the 2 plastic body halves met, a small gap around the power button, and the threaded attachment point for the brush head.
Our evaluators felt that, visually, this brush was average, with no major, visually glaring detractors. However, it is a little more effort to swap brush heads with their screw-on attachment system than the click-on system favored by most other models.
The Essence was the only brush with a screw-on brush attachment system.
Credit: Kat Elliott
Battery Life
This toothbrush lasted for a whopping 29 days on a full charge, making it more than reasonable to travel with this brush and leave the charger behind for all but the longest trips.
Value
This product is one of the most bare-bones models and is priced accordingly with a low MSRP of $40. This would be an attractive option for those on the tightest of budgets and offers good value in that it will work acceptably well and you get exactly what you pay for: a low price for the lowest performing model that we tested.
Conclusion
While this is an acceptable toothbrush, we would recommend just spending a little more for some features that we deemed crucial throughout our testing process, such as a quadrant timer. Some much better brushes only cost a little bit more and might even save you some money in the long run with less expensive and more readily available replacement brush heads.
—David Wise and Austin Palmer
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