Wasabi Toothpaste Killed My Bad Breath and Saved Me From Mercury Poisoning

Most people have a regular neighborhood bar where everyone knows their name. I have my sushi place. Every time I go in, the restaurant owner greets me with a smile and yells out "LINDSEY!" That's not my name, but I love sushi so much, I don't correct him. If it weren't for the threat of mercury poisoning, I'd start a new diet where all I ate was California rolls. But alas, my vice, like all vices, is potentially poisonous in mass quantities.

So when I heard there was a safe way to ingest a main sushi condiment twice daily and, better yet, actually improve my health by it, I knew I needed in. As it turns out, one Instagram-famous brand has a solution — but it comes with a catch. Aesop, an Australian label known for its popular plant-based skincare sets, now sells Wasabi Toothpaste ($17).

Yup, the closest thing you can get to sushi-flavored oral-health goodness tastes like that chunk of green spicy stuff people like me push as far away from their sashimi as possible. I brought my sample home fully convinced that I was going to faint the immediate second this toothpaste hit my mouth.

This creamy, fluoride-free paste lives inside a pistachio-colored tube. It's made of sea buckthorn, cardamon, and wasabia japonica (the official plant name for my nightmare condiment). I have extremely sensitive gums, so the sea buckthorn is especially important for me, because of its soothing properties. While that first essential oil calms, the strong cardamom and wasabi extracts are supposed to sneak in and kill bad-breath germs.

Although I was so nervous to try this toothpaste for the first time that my hand shook faster than the head on my electric toothbrush, my fears were quickly quelled by the flavor of . . . an iced chai latte. Turns out, taste-wise, the secondary hints of anise, spearmint, and clove are more noticeable than the wasabi. The result is a weirdly tasty toothpaste that doesn't really remind me of sushi at all. But that's OK, because it delivers results that, dare I say it, are better than an inside-out hand roll.

I sleep with my mouth open, which is very cute and endearing and not at all embarrassing when I nap on planes. It also means that my morning breath is . . . just that, morning breath. Usually it takes a full two minutes of brushing for the scent to subside, but I felt an instant refreshing feeling the exact second this wasabi toothpaste touched my gums. While it made me feel instantly clean, it didn't totally numb me. In other words, it didn't taste like I'd just popped an Altoid.

And that's all good, because at $17 a tube (enough for a four-pack of my basic Crest), this toothpaste should work miracles. And even though it doesn't taste like my beloved California roll, what it lacks in true sushi flavor, it makes up for in completely erasing my bad breath.