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Aesop has been making mouthwash since 2013. With the 2017 debut of its toothpaste, the company ventured more deeply into the burgeoning high-end dental-care market, which includes minimalist bamboo toothbrushes, $24 mouthwash in vintage-looking glass flasks, and the beauty retailer Sephora’s first floss vendor. That, according to the luxury-marketing expert Dina Fierro, is the result of a stacked personal-care market that has forced businesses to get creative. “If you look at cosmetics or skin care, those are saturated spaces,” she says. “You’re going to see more brands innovating in categories that are a little less sexy. Brands have got to find the white space.”

The U.S. oral-care market was valued at $28 billion in 2017 and is expected to keep growing over the next five years, making it primed for the kind of disruption that’s happened in formerly staid industries such as skin care or bedding. Market veterans such as the ornately packaged Italian brand Marvis and upstarts such as the ultra-minimal Davids all promise basically the same thing: clean teeth and a pretty tube on your sink. It’s a pleasant sensorial experience in an otherwise drab part of the day.

The luxury of fancy toothpaste is in the act of owning and using the product itself, not the fact that you get to keep your teeth while people who can pay only $2 to $6 for conventional toothpaste can’t. That’s a refreshingly direct value proposition, and one that runs contrary to current trends in personal care, which tend to make big-benefit claims from small shifts in product composition. “They’re really not selling you on the ingredients or the formulations,” says Fierro. “That’s not the point of differentiation for many of these products from a marketing standpoint.”

Why people might spend those few extra bucks when a conventional toothpaste would suffice might seem baffling when you first hear the term luxury toothpaste, but once you get over the initial shock and remember that Instagram exists, it’s a little easier to conceptualize. Fierro, a friend from my previous life in the fashion industry, is pretty frank about her own appreciation for fancy toothpaste. “Form matters as much as function to me. I was seduced by the packaging,” she says.

She’s never Instagrammed her toothpaste, but plenty of people do: The #marvis hashtag contains more than 65,000 posts on the social network, most depicting the brand’s signature metallic tubes artfully arranged with other aesthetically pleasing beauty products. In that regard, high-end toothpaste is just like any other entry-level luxury good: In addition to its straightforward use, any luxury product also serves as a status-signaler, whether guests spot your expensive toothpaste after excusing themselves to your bathroom or your followers see it in the corner of an Instagrammed skin-care collection.