Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review

The Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction electric toothbrush offers a variety of cleaning modes to help you care for your teeth at home.

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review
(Image: © Oral-B)

Top Ten Reviews Verdict

The Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction cleans teeth easily. It's a little noisy in use, but it delivers an effective clean to help you stay on top of plaque build-up.

Pros

  • +

    Great cleaning performance

  • +

    Whitening mode

  • +

    Rechargeable travel case

Cons

  • -

    Quite loud in use

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The Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction electric toothbrush is designed to help you maintain better gum and teeth health in between visits to your hygienist. Oral-B makes some of the world's best electric toothbrushes, and it has designed this one with a series of different cleaning modes to cleanse not only your teeth, but your tongue too. 

It's suitable for travel use too, as the rechargeable electric toothbrush comes with a handy travel case that actually charges the toothbrush while housing it. As with other Bluetooth Oral-B electric toothbrushes, the Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction works with the brand's companion app to give you insight into your brushing habits. 

This insight could help your improve your oral hygiene and take better care of your teeth in-between trips to the dentist. If you're looking for dental coverage, read our guide to the best dental insurance.

So there's a lot going on here for what is supposed to be quite a humble product, but is the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction electric toothbrush all gimmick, no substance? Time to find out... 

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review: Features

Spec

Brush power and type: Oscillating brush with 10,500 rotations and 48,000 pulsations.
Brush modes: Clean, Pro Clean, Sensitive, 3D White, Gum Care and Tongue Clean.
Provided accessories: Wireless charger, brush stand and charging travel case.

If there’s one thing that the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 isn’t short of, it’s cleaning modes. There are, count them, six modes to choose from. Each lasts a different amount of time, but all work with the Professional Timer, which sends you a pulse for each quarter, prompting you to move onto a different quadrant in your mouth.

To change modes you just tap the selector button on the front of the brush to cycle through the options, which lights up the matching icon on the brush handle. Well, we say, matching icon, as they are a little tricky to decipher and don’t always make a huge amount of sense, and the standard cleaning mode has no icon.

The modes are: Pro Clean (a three-minute intensive clean), Sensitive (ideal for sensitive teeth and gums), Gum Care (gently massages your gums), Tongue mode (20-second tongue cleaning), and 3D White mode (where the brush powers up and down to polish your teeth). For whitening at home, also try using one of the best teeth whiteners

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review

(Image credit: Oral-B)

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review: Design

The Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 is a large and chunky brush that feels well built. If you’re used to a cheaper model with fewer cleaning modes, this brush will feel quite large in your hand.

You can buy the brush in four colors - Black, White, Rose Gold or Orchid Purple - which is plenty of choice to find something that you like. Neatly, if you buy the black version, the travel case you get is black to match; the other versions have a white travel case.

Every brush has an LED ring that lights up when the brush is turned on. It’s a white light by default, but hook the brush up to the smartphone app and you can choose what color you want. It’s a little thing, but we like the attention to detail here. And, if you have a family that has the same brush handle, you can use this feature to distinguish your brushes.

All of Oral-B’s brush heads have a round head that can oscillate when the brush is powered on. They’re all designed for a different purpose. The 3D Whitehead has bristles on the outside for cleaning between teeth, but its main thing is a polishing cup in the middle to whiten your teeth. 

With the Sensi Ultrathin, the bristles are very soft so that they won’t irritate your gums or tongue. The CrossAction head is the brush that most people will use the most, with a combination of bristles set at an angle to both closely clean a tooth’s surface and get between the gaps of your teeth.

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review: Accessories

While the modes are good to see, you really need the right brushes to make the most of them. Fortunately, Oral-B is generous with the selection in the box. You get two CrossAction heads, which are for everyday cleaning; a 3D Whitehead, which has a polishing cup for use with the 3D White mode; and a Sensi Ultrathin brush, which has very soft bristles and is for the Sensitive and Tongue Cleaning modes.

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review

(Image credit: Oral-B)

Fortunately, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000’s large stand has a compartment for storing the brushes that you’re not using. All of the brushes have blue bristles, which start to fade with use: when the blue has half gone, it’s time to change them. 

Typically, for a brush head that you use all of the time, you should get around three months’ use out of them. Replacement heads typically cost around $18 for a pack of four, although you can often find better deals.

As well as the regular stand, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 ships with a hard travel case, which has room for the brush handle and two brush heads. It acts as a portable charger, too, with a shaver-point charging cable in the box. You’ll notice that there’s a USB port on the case, which lets you charge another device (slowly) from your travel case.

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review: Performance

Typically, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 should charge within 12 hours and then provides up to 12 days of use, although how many times you brush and the brush mode that you use will make a difference.

The Bluetooth icon on the front of the brush tells you that the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 is a little different to the competition. Using Bluetooth you can hook the toothbrush up to your phone and then use the app to help you brush better.

So that you can see your phone clearly, Oral-B provides a mount with a rubber sucker that you can stick securely to a mirror, and the travel case acts as a phone holder, too. At its most basic, the app displays a timer on-screen, prompting you to change quadrant each quarter of the way through.

There’s also positional tracking, which uses your phone’s camera to track where the brush is and correct you if you’re not cleaning evenly. That’s the theory, but the app is a little gimmicky and the tracking didn’t work very well for us. Once we’d tried it for a few days, we found it better to just use the brush’s Professional Timer to guide us to the right quadrant we should be cleaning.

There’s a pressure sensor built in, which turns the brush’s LED ring red when you push too hard. That’s a really useful feature as you can quickly learn how hard you should be pushing to get a proper clean.

Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction review: Performance

  • Cleans teeth exceptionally well
  • Can take a few days to get used to
  • Very loud when compared to sonic models

As one of Oral-B’s top-of-the-range brushes, the Genius Pro 8000 is also one of the most powerful. It can output 10,500 rotations and 48,000 pulsations. The effect of this is that you can really feel the brush at work and it takes a while to get used to, with the warning that you may experience a bit of gum bleeding. In testing, we found that it took us three days of use before we were comfortable using the 8000, after which there was no discomfort.

All of this power translates into amazing cleaning. With our test teeth, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 pulled out all of the food debris and polished away all of the stains for a perfect cleaning result.

Using the brush on ourselves, we found that we had a fresh-feeling and clean mouth at the end with the brush removing all traces of plaque. Switching modes to the sensitive mode with the sensitive brush head, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 is surprisingly gentle, helping clean our gums and tongue.

The downside is that, as is typical for rotational brushes, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 is very loud peaking at 82.3dB when measured from ear level with the brush in our mouth. The loud mechanical racket is hard to ignore and sonic brushes are typically a lot quieter.

Should I buy the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 CrossAction?

Overall, it’s hard to beat the combination of power, cleaning performance and accessories that the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 delivers, making it excellent value. The worst things we can find to say about this brush are that the app’s not that much use once you’ve had a go, and that it’s comparatively noisy and takes a few days to get used to.

Once you do get used to this powerful brush, the combination of cleaning modes and provided brush heads make it easy to clean all parts of your mouth and end up with fresh-feeling teeth. 

If you prefer a sonic toothbrush, the Philips Sonicare ProtectiveClean 5100 is great value, but if you have no real preference for toothbrush technology or prefer oscillating models, the Oral-B Genius Pro 8000 is the best that you can buy.

David has been working in technology journalism since 1998 and has been editor of Computer Shopper and Expert Reviews in the past, before he started writing for the Top Ten Reviews brand. He is also an expert on home appliances, kitchen gadgets, home security and smart home products, which he reviews for Top Ten Reviews.