The Crown Glossary
The words that come up when you read about tooth powder, enamel and minerals, defined plainly. Where research is relevant we link it so you can read it yourself.
- Tooth Powder
- A dry alternative to toothpaste. Paste needs water, humectants, thickeners and preservatives to hold its form in a tube, and a powder omits all of it, keeping only the working ingredients. You wet the brush, dip, and brush as normal. More on the format in What is tooth powder.
- Hydroxyapatite
- The calcium phosphate mineral that makes up the bulk of tooth enamel. Because it is the same material the tooth is built from, it has been studied for decades as a topical ingredient in oral care. See Remineralization for what that research examines, or read What is hydroxyapatite.
- Microcrystalline Hydroxyapatite (MCHA)
- Hydroxyapatite in a microcrystalline form, meaning the crystals are small and irregular rather than milled to a uniform particle. It is the form Crown uses, at 15% of the formula. Sourced from New Zealand.
- Grass-Fed Hydroxyapatite
- Hydroxyapatite derived from the bone mineral of pasture-raised cattle rather than synthesised in a lab. The description refers to how the source animals were raised. Crown's is Grass-Fed Hydroxyapatite (MCHA) from New Zealand.
- Kaolin Clay
- A soft white clay used as a gentle cleansing and polishing agent. It sits below enamel on the Mohs hardness scale, which is why it helps lift surface stains without the abrasion of a harsher polish. In Crown it is the body of the powder, the part that does the physical work. Crown's is from Georgia, USA.
- Organic Birch Xylitol
- A sugar alcohol derived from birch, used in oral care for its taste and its behaviour in the mouth. Unlike sugar it is not a food source for the bacteria that feed on sugar. Crown's is from Finland.
- Amabito no Moshio
- A Japanese seaweed salt made in Kamagari, in Hiroshima Prefecture, in the tradition of moshio. Moshio means "seaweed salt", and the method behind it is more than two thousand years old, practiced in Japan long before salt was something you bought in a box. It was lost for centuries and revived in modern times after Yayoi-period earthenware was excavated on the island, giving makers enough evidence to reconstruct how it had been done. The salt is produced by steeping hondawara seaweed, so the seaweed's minerals carry into the finished salt and give it a soft, savoury character rather than a flat sharpness. It is the ingredient in Crown with the longest story attached to it, and the reason the formula reads the way it does.
- Organically Grown Peppermint Essential Oil
- Steam-distilled oil from organically grown peppermint, used for flavour and for lasting fresh breath. It is the ingredient responsible for how Crown tastes. Crown's is from Italy.
- Organic Menthol Crystals
- Menthol in solid crystalline form, taken from mint oil and allowed to crystallise. A very small quantity carries a cooling sensation, which is why it is measured rather than poured. In Crown it finishes the peppermint with a cool that holds after you rinse.
- Fluoride-Free
- Made without fluoride, the mineral added to most conventional toothpaste and to much of the public water supply. Crown is fluoride-free. That is a description of the formula, not a claim about fluoride, and whether you want fluoride in your routine is a conversation for you and your dentist.
- Enamel
- The hard outer layer of the tooth and the most mineralised tissue in the body, made largely of hydroxyapatite. It has no living cells, which is why it does not regrow the way skin or bone does. That property is what makes the exchange of minerals at its surface interesting to researchers.
- Remineralization
- The scientific term for the process by which minerals are redeposited into enamel after they have been lost. It is a subject of ongoing dental research, and hydroxyapatite is one of the ingredients that research has examined. Two studies are worth reading directly: Amaechi et al. (2019) in BDJ Open, and an 18-month randomized controlled trial published in Frontiers in Public Health (2023), in which researchers found a 10% hydroxyapatite toothpaste performed comparably to fluoride on early enamel lesions. We link the research rather than make a claim on its behalf.