Is this really so frigging hard?

You may think you know how to brush your teeth. But you’re probably wrong.

At first I thought it was just an isolated case. Once in a while, I noticed a small lump of toothpaste clinging to the slope of my girlfriend’s bathroom sink. But then it was another, and another. And soon I realized: my girlfriend does not know how to brush her teeth properly! But then the lumps started coming in different colors, both the white-veined green of my girlfriend’s Colgate and the grainy white of her then-roommate’s Tom’s of Maine (or some other organic crap). Still, I assumed it to be isolated cases.

But then I moved in with another roommate, a very old friend. And what did I see in the sink after only a couple of weeks? A little white puff of Arm & Hammer toothpaste, hanging on the lip of the sink like the Michelin Man camping out on a cliff en route to the top of El Capitan. And I finally understood: you are all idiots, and don’t know how to brush your teeth. Or at least enough of you that I have to offer this primer.

Step 1: Wet the brush

I do not mean the toilet brush. I’m taking nothing for granted anymore.

Step 2: Apply toothpaste to the brush

If you’ve got a tube, squeeze from the bottom. Whatever toothpaste dispenser you possess, place a medium-sized gob on the brush. It should cover half the brush.

Step 3: Press toothpaste into the brush BEFORE YOU BEGIN BRUSHING

You or someone you know could be the next
victim.

This is where you all get confused. This is where all the mayhem and tragedy happen. Press the goddamn toothpaste into the toothbrush. The easiest way to do this is by pressing it against your tongue. If you skip Step 3 and proceed immediately to Step 4, the gob of toothpaste will most likely detach from your brush while you are brushing. Do you know what this means? It means you are only brushing your teeth with the faint residue of that toothpaste gob. You might as well not use toothpaste at all! While your brush searches for those deep, dark crevices of your crowns and canines and wisdom teeth (I have all four of mine), the toothpaste, that fluoride-providing, cavity-fighting, plaque-fighting, whitening blob of goodness that was created by hundreds of years of oral hygiene science, is just floating about in your mouth, doing absolutely nothing. How horrible is that?

And then when you spit it out, it doesn’t always wash down the drain and instead dries out forcing someone to scrape it off with a sponge or fingernail. I mean, yech. Can you think of another daily ablution that with such a simple mistake can go so horribly wrong and lead to so much terror and global conflagration?

Step 4: Brush your teeth

If you followed Step 3, you’re in good hands. Here, I’m just going to assume that you know to brush all your teeth and from the bottom and both sides. I could go into more detail, but failure on this step doesn’t really affect my life in the way failure on Step 3 does. So go ahead and let your teeth rot. Just don’t leave a goddamn gob of toothpaste in the sink.
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The Rules is a semi-weekly (okay, semi-annual) column where Ethan Todras-Whitehill sets forth the definitive truth on pretty much everything. Umbrage encouraged.