The Toothpaste on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

Toothpaste sits in the item catalog's "clothing-adjacent" bucket, one of five personal-care categories a contestant has to spend an actual slot on rather than getting for free the way standard-issue clothing works. Of the 187 contestants across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, 101 have a recorded gear list. None of them include toothpaste. That's zero documented picks in the sourced write-ups behind this data, not proof no contestant has ever quietly packed a travel tube; it means nobody's toothpaste choice made it into a published gear breakdown.

A category with no catalog history at all

Unlike soap, which the catalog tags "occasionally-picked" and sources to an outside gear guide, toothpaste's popularity field reads simply "unknown," and there's no product example on file either. That puts it a step below even the near-zero items elsewhere on the list. Salt has no catalog rule but still has 9 real carries behind it; toothpaste has neither a rule nor a single sourced pick, real or catalog-example.

Dental problems on the show aren't a brushing problem

The show has produced a genuine dental emergency without toothpaste being anywhere near the cause. On season 3, Megan Hanacek reached day 78 and third place before biting into a rosehip seed hard enough to break teeth, the jaw pain ending a run that was otherwise on track to go the distance. That was a mechanical fracture from chewing hard foraged food under a calorie deficit, not decay from months without brushing, and it's a useful reminder that the dental risks contestants actually face on Alone (a broken tooth from a hard seed, not a cavity from six weeks of no toothpaste) aren't the ones a hygiene item in the pack would prevent anyway.

Why the slot never gets spent here

Weight isn't really the obstacle; a travel tube of toothpaste costs almost nothing in either. The real competition is against every other one of the ten choices, and oral hygiene simply doesn't affect whether a contestant gets a fire started, catches fish, or survives the next cold night, the three problems that decide most seasons. A contestant weighing a toothpaste tube against a second length of snare wire or a backup ferro rod is weighing a comfort item against something that could end their run early if they don't have it, and comfort loses every time on a show where a bad night's sleep matters less than a missed meal.

Baking soda, chewed twigs, or plain water rinsing are the standard low-tech substitutes survivalists reach for when a dedicated toothpaste isn't in the kit, though nothing in the recorded gear lists here confirms any specific contestant using one of those methods on camera; it's simply the general practice the absence of toothpaste would leave people falling back on.

For the rest of the clothing-adjacent hygiene categories and how the ten-item rule treats them, see clothing on Alone: what doesn't count toward your 10 items and the items nobody picks on Alone. The toothpaste gear page has the category's full (thin) catalog entry, and the official rules page covers the complete approved-items list it sits inside.