Modern life has successfully divorced us from a vast range of filthy indignities our ancestors had to deal with. Today’s bathroom is so good at its job that you’re able to unleash all kinds of toxic hell into it, and you’re actively annoyed if you smell a hint of anything besides ocean breeze or forest glade.
The toilet brush, on the other hand, breaks the illusion. I understand that some people use theirs just for cleaning, and I’m happy for those people, I really am. Others of us sometimes need to use them to break, partition or dislodge things too scary for any horror movie.
Putting the brush back in its little caddy after this kind of action is a sour reminder that for all the civility of modern living, we still have this thing dangling in place, dripping poop-water, the odd clump of bristles fudged rudely together … we pretend it doesn’t exist. But it does. These things lurk in the most aristocratic of bathrooms, mocking our pretenses, reminding us of the crude, grubby, hollow tubes we really are.
Which brings us to the Lumi brush. This thing is an industrial strength log chopper with a replaceable head, a handle you could use as a crowbar, and the neatest toilet brush caddy base we’ve ever seen.
The headline item is a multi-lamp ultraviolet sanitizer, which blasts the brush with UV light from several directions, tuned to the correct frequencies for killing germs. It’s the same sort of thing your barber keeps the sharps in, and the interior of the brush holder has a reflective coating that makes sure every bristle gets treated.
It doesn’t end there – drain vents let the brush dry quickly, and there’s a (mercifully hidden) evaporation pan said to help get rid of any drips. The base (complete with AAA batteries) automatically opens and closes, which is a nice touch, and the base itself is weighted so it’s hard to tip over.
Some serious thought has gone into building the ultimate toilet brush here. On face value, we think it deserves a place in the pantheon of bog scrubbers, alongside the eight-bladed silicone LooBlade and the totally hands-off SpinX robot.