How to brush your teeth like Rick Owens

Fortune, it turns out, really does favour the bold; at least when you’re looking to collaborate with Rick Owens. ‘I wrote a story about my daily life in a magazine in which I said: “I brush my teeth with Selahatin toothpaste because I love their font,” which was true,’ says Owens. ‘Then, on Instagram, I saw a Selahatin ad with my blurred face and my quote over it. I thought that was bold. I contacted them and complimented them on their cheekiness. I told them: “We should do a collaboration!” That’s how we got here.’

‘Here’ is a collaboration between the oral care brand and the Dark Prince of Fashion that includes a handmade horn toothbrush, as well as a whitening toothpaste, a mouthwash and a concentrated mouth spray with a flavour and scent inspired by Owens’s bold, brutalist aesthetic. Selahatin’s speciality is creating products for your teeth that are composed with the same rigour and offer the same sensory pleasure as fine food or perfume (think a toothpaste that’s flavoured with lime, salt and peppermint; or a eucalyptus, honey and menthol mouthwash). For the Rick Owens collection, founder Kristoffer Vural was pushed to think even farther outside the box.

‘Throughout the process, Rick urged: “Go harder. I smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and gin – I need something stronger”,’ says Vural. ‘It’s unorthodox – but that’s the point. It’s Rick.’ Rick, as a toothpaste, opens with a potent blend of verbena, Madagascar vanilla, and Sichuan pepper, followed by fresh juniper, dark citrus, and rosemary, and finished off with a black pepper and peppermint base for a slightly metallic finish.’

While it was Vural’s bold marketing tactics that brought the pair together, their real alignment is born out of a shared belief that life's most mundane moments can often be the best opportunities for a ceremonial experience. Vural launched Selahatin after a stroke left him with a hypersensitivity for taste and smell that made even brushing his teeth with traditional minty toothpaste an uncomfortable ordeal.

As he told Wallpaper* in an interview last year, toothpaste ‘tastes so synthetic, so chemical, so strong. It’s got to be the most loveless product with no meaning… When you’re stripped of everything [you realise] it’s the small things that make up 50 per cent of your life. If you can fix the small things, you have a really good baseline.’ Or as Owens says, ‘[Vural] wanted the most essential things around him to be magnified. I also believe in the idea that you don’t need to have many things, but that essential things should be made special.’

For Vural, the collaboration is a full-circle moment, a perfect expression of how he turned the darkest moment of his life into an opportunity for creativity and collaboration. ‘Selahatin was born out of a simple idea: to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary,’ he says. ‘Collaborating with Rick Owens fully brings that vision to life. After a stroke left me starting over, creating Selahatin became a way to find myself again. What began as an attempt to elevate a mundane act evolved into a lifeline that helped me climb out of a dark place. That this improbable journey would lead me here, alongside Rick Owens, is beyond anything I could have imagined all those years ago.’