Hydroxyapatite toothpaste brands compared

The trials that made hydroxyapatite toothpaste a category used 10%. Two of the brands we checked publish their concentration. Three do not, and one of those is the manufacturer whose products the trials tested. That is the finding, and it is more useful than any ranking, because a percentage you cannot verify is not a specification — it is a rumour.

What follows is a snapshot, taken from each company’s own website on 9 September 2026. Formulations and prices change; the disclosure habits change more slowly, which is why they are what this page is actually about.

What each brand publishes on its own site

Two disclose, three do not. Note also that the two that disclose contradict a common assumption: RiseWell’s figure is for the micro form, not nano, which is the opposite of how the category is usually described. We go through why that distinction is mostly legal rather than clinical on nano vs micro hydroxyapatite.

Where the numbers you read online come from

Search for any of these brands with the word “percentage” and you will find confident figures attached to all of them, usually 10%. Read a few and you will also find them contradicting each other about the same product, and occasionally contradicting the brand.

Almost none of those pages is a manufacturer. They are affiliate round-ups, and a round-up needs a number in every cell of its table, so a number appears. Sometimes it came from customer service, sometimes from another round-up, sometimes from the writer’s sense of what the answer ought to be. The check we run on supplement pages applies just as well here: follow the figure back and see whether it terminates anywhere.

There is a related trap on the brand pages themselves. Several explain that hydroxyapatite makes up around 97% of tooth enamel. That is true and has nothing to do with the tube. It is a fact about your teeth sitting where a reader is looking for a fact about the product.

What an ingredient list will actually tell you

More than you would think, if you know the rule. Under the EU cosmetics regulation, the ingredient list “shall be established in descending order of weight of the ingredients at the time they are added to the cosmetic product”, and — the important part — “ingredients in concentrations of less than 1% may be listed in any order after those in concentrations of more than 1%”. The same convention governs American labels in practice.

That gives you a floor, not a figure:

• Hydroxyapatite in the first four or five ingredients means it is above 1% and above whatever comes after it. In the trial paste it sits fifth and is 10%.
• Hydroxyapatite near the end, after the thickeners and flavourings, is consistent with it being under 1% — a tenth of what the trials used, present mainly so it can appear on the front of the pack.
• You cannot tell where the 1% line falls. No label marks it, which is why Fig. 1 shades that region rather than drawing a line.

On a European product there is one more free piece of information: if the particles meet the legal nano definition, the name must be followed by (nano) in brackets. American labels carry no equivalent, so the ingredient list there tells you nothing about particle size.

Price, and why the comparison is harder than it looks

Only one of the brands we checked publishes both a price and a volume in a form that lets you compute a rate without guessing. Karex’s German site does the arithmetic for you, in euros per litre, on the listing page. As of 9 September 2026:

For the American brands, the listing pages we read gave a price — Boka from $11.62, Davids from $10.95 — without a volume on the same page, so we are not going to print a rate we would have had to infer. That is a smaller problem than it sounds, because cross-currency comparisons here are close to meaningless anyway: the same tube costs different amounts in different markets for reasons that have nothing to do with what is in it.

What is worth saying is the shape of the market rather than the digits. A hydroxyapatite toothpaste generally costs several times what an ordinary fluoride toothpaste costs, and nothing in the clinical evidence suggests the expensive ones outperform the cheap ones. If you are choosing, the concentration is the variable with any evidence behind it, and it is the one most brands will not tell you.

How to compare two tubes in about a minute

1. Find the concentration on the brand’s own site Not on a round-up, not on a marketplace listing. If the brand does not say, that is your answer for now — and worth an email to them, because they do sometimes reply.
2. Check where hydroxyapatite sits in the ingredient list Top five is a meaningful amount. Below the flavourings is a red flag. This works even when no percentage is published anywhere.
3. Check whether it also contains fluoride Several products now combine the two. That is not a compromise product; if you are not avoiding fluoride on principle, it is arguably the better-evidenced option.
4. Ignore the particle-size claim on the front No human trial has compared nano with micro in a mouth. It is a legal category, not a grade.
5. Work out the price per 100 ml yourself Tube sizes vary more than prices do, and the pack that looks cheaper often is not.

What we could not verify

• Karex’s Canadian regulatory claim. Its site states that its children’s toothpaste is the first and only fluoride-free hydroxyapatite toothpaste licensed by Health Canada as an anti-caries product. Health Canada’s licensed natural health products database timed out on repeated attempts, so we report that as the manufacturer’s claim and nothing more. If it holds up, it is significant: it would be one regulator accepting an anti-caries claim for hydroxyapatite, which no US or UK body has done.
• Whether unpublished concentrations are high or low. A brand that does not publish a figure is not thereby a brand with a bad one. It is a brand you cannot check.
• Anything about how the products perform against each other, because nobody has tested that.

Read this alongside

The evidence that any of these products work at all — and who paid to generate it — is set out on does hydroxyapatite toothpaste actually work and do dentists recommend hydroxyapatite. If you are buying for a child, start with hydroxyapatite vs fluoride for children instead, because the decision there is different.

No brand on this page paid for its inclusion, none is linked, and this site earns nothing from any of them. Our disclosure sets out where the site’s money does come from.

Fig. 1 is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 — see the diagrams page.