It was bound to happen. Toothpaste, perhaps the last part of your daily grooming regimen that had not been gussied up, has now been rethought. Chic dental care has arrived.

It wasn’t so long ago that toothpaste, floss and mouthwashes were perfunctory products meant to clean but also to instill a certain amount of fear (ack, cavities! bad breath? lose all your friends!). That was the epiphany Craig Dubitsky, the founder of Hello oral care, experienced a few years ago when standing in his local drugstore in Manhattan.

“Everything was a big swath of blue and a big swath of red, like the cola wars,” said Mr. Dubitsky, who formerly worked at Eos, a company he helped found that makes lip balms and other skin-care products. “And why am I seeing a picture of an extracted tooth on the products? Or a staff wrapped with snakes. Then I started reading the ingredients, and it was things like triclosan and saccharin. The F.D.A. banned triclosan for hand soap, but you could still put it in your mouth. I thought it was insane.”

Mr. Dubitsky set out to rethink the whole category.

He ditched what he called the “emotional scare tactics” and branded his line with the friendliest word he could think of: Hello. Then he hired a formulator to work with him on products like charcoal toothpaste and mouthwashes with aloe vera.