Katy Perry recently revealed a startling piece of information about partner Orlando Bloom. During an interview with U.K. radio show Heart Breakfast this week, Perry was asked what Bloom’s worst habit is. And it turns out the actor engages in a highly questionable—okay, we’re just gonna be real: super gross—ritual surrounding his oral health.
It actually started out pretty positive. “He loves to floss,” Perry said. “Which, thank God, because some partners don’t, and it’s disgusting. He has brilliant teeth.” Indeed, daily flossing is crucial for good oral health because it cleans out particles of food and bacteria that can get stuck between teeth and potentially lead to serious issues like gum inflammation, bad breath, plaque build-up, and cavities, as SELF has explained. So we’re sure Bloom’s dentist is very happy with him.
But there’s a shudder-inducing dark side to Bloom’s good habit. “He leaves the floss everywhere,” Perry said. As in, used floss. Perry is living in a world where there are used strands of floss “on the side of my bed, and in the car, and on the kitchen table,” she said. “I’m like, there [are] bins everywhere.” How could this nightmare happen? Imagine, if you will, Orlando Bloom finishing up a flossing session and deciding, “I’m going to leave this right here on the kitchen table.” Now imagine, for a moment, the look of horror on Katy Perry’s face as she sits down for breakfast only to discover a frayed, stinky, saliva-crusted strand of dental floss with little bits of food debris hanging off of it.
Now, look: A lot of us probably have weird, unseemly little habits, or repeatedly do things that annoy our partner. Maybe you clip your toenails in the bedroom or try to be a good partner by fishing your hair out of the drain only to routinely leave the slimy clump sitting on the side of the shower. We’re sure that Bloom has a number of redeeming qualities that balance out this extremely gross one—like those gorgeous pearly whites and being an “incredible” parent, in Perry’s words. But we must defend the right of partners everywhere to live in a home that is not littered with dirty floss piles.
You don’t need a Ph.D. in microbiology to know in your gut that leaving used pieces of floss lying around is gross—that’s just basic cleanliness and common decency. But if you’re going to ruthlessly drag the personal hygiene habits of famous people, a Ph.D. can’t hurt—so we asked one to weigh on on how wrong this habit really is.
“I honestly didn’t know people did this,” Omai Garner, Ph.D., assistant clinical professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and director of clinical microbiology in the UCLA Health System, tells SELF. Is it as unsanitary as it seems? Appallingly so, Dr. Garner says. “I mean, I almost would equate it to somebody who is just, like, spitting in their house,” he explains. “It’s just right out of the mouth, holding onto whatever is there and then sitting there waiting for somebody to pick it up.”
Used pieces of floss are basically little strings of stinky bacteria and food bits, Dr. Garner says. “The bacterial content is so high on the floss,” he says. “The mouth is naturally full of bacteria, but the challenge is the bacteria that’s on floss is the bacteria that is eating away at the food that’s between your teeth” and/or causing dental disease, Dr. Garner explains. If you’ve ever happened to catch a whiff of your own used floss—or had the exceedingly unfortunate experience of encountering your partner’s used floss, as Perry has—you’ll know that all that bacteria can create a particularly unpleasant odor. “This is why it smells,” Dr. Garner says.
Also, flossing also tends to flick stuff—food bits, saliva, and bacteria—all over the place, Dr. Garner points out. Fortunately, most people perform their flossing in the bathroom, over the sink. Flossing in your car, in your kitchen, and in bed, as Perry claims Bloom does, means you could be flinging that stuff all over the surrounding area. The stovetop. The steering wheel. Your pillow. Your partner’s pillow.
There’s one more expert critique of his bizarre flossing behavior that we’d be remiss not to mention. In addition to scientifically validating our disgust, Dr. Garner pointed out that if the flosser’s saliva is infected with a certain kind of pathogen, a piece of freshly used floss could pose a health hazard to anyone who comes into close contact with it. “On a more serious note,” Dr. Garner says, “that floss could transmit COVID.”
We know that saliva can carry a high concentration of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And a 2021 study funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the journal Nature Medicine demonstrated that viral transmission via saliva can occur. Dr. Garner hasn’t seen any data on the flossing scenario—because who is testing for COVID transmission via used floss, honestly? “But my guess is a COVID-positive person could be leaving around COVID-positive floss,” he says. While it’s not likely, Dr. Garner can see a scenario where a person gets infected by picking up somebody else’s piece of wet floss and then touching their own mouth or nose.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a case where that happened,” Dr. Garner adds, “but again, that’s because people throw their floss away.” Unless “people” is Orlando Bloom. “And you could avoid that risk entirely,” Dr. Garner says, “if that floss just goes where it’s supposed to go—which is in the garbage.”
Which brings us back to the point, here. However improbable viral transmission via used floss may be, when a personal hygiene habit doubles as a hypothetical vector for COVID, that’s a pretty good indicator that it is unacceptably gross. So the floss littering must end.
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