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Bastét is an oral-care brand whose co-founders approached Montreal and Los Angeles-based design studio Wedge to turn a product idea into a complete brand world. The mission? To build an oral-care company that would ‘do no harm, only health.’ Launching with a high-performance toothpaste, they handed Wedge a remit spanning naming, strategy, narrative, identity, packaging and production. The guiding idea was to pair serious science with the pleasure of high design, turning a daily necessity into something restorative that the brand calls ‘Designed For Human Systems.’ “The opportunity is to see oral care as part of a beauty, wellness and self-care ritual, transcending tradition and norms,” explains Chief Design Director Justin Lortie.

With integrity, beauty and protection set as Bastét’s foundation, Wedge went looking for a figure who embodied them and found the Egyptian goddess Bastet, whose duty, in the brand’s telling, is to protect, nurture and share beauty. “It is not uncommon to seek inspiration in gods or goddesses when it comes to brand naming. Nike is a prime example: the goddess of victory,” notes Chief Creative Director Sarah Di Domenico. The brand adds an acute accent that the goddess’s name lacks.

The product beneath the name centres on 10% nano-hydroxyapatite, a mineral found naturally in human teeth and bones and used to support enamel protection and remineralisation. “nHA is the hero, the reason this product exists,” Lortie tells us. “So the hierarchy is simple: the name, then the proof.” The proof is a green badge, the one colour on the packaging, given to the ingredient claim – drawn to balance function with beauty. An unfamiliar ingredient has to earn trust, so Wedge kept some of the category’s established conventions. “We kept the No List and brushing instructions, because with nHA the method is part of the performance: spit, don’t rinse,” he continues.

The wordmark takes its forms from the carved lettering on the façade of the Grande Galerie de l’Évolution at Paris’s Natural History Museum, completed in 1889. “The logo is drawn, not typeset. We gave it unusual terminals, narrow joins, sharp apertures,” Lortie details. Those same engraved letters have been revived as a typeface, Olivier Dolbeau’s Daubenton, a high-contrast serif in the Didot lineage of strong vertical stress and crisp, unbracketed serifs; it is the brand’s primary typeface. For everything small, the packaging turns to Nimbus Sans in Regular and Condensed. Lortie describes it as doing “the quiet work” – neutral enough to set a bilingual ingredients list at very small sizes.

Bilingual packaging, French and English on every panel, is standard in the category, and here it defined the box’s architecture: a fully branded panel, a side panel per language for the brand story, instructions and ingredients, and a bilingual front of pack. “You have to say everything twice, so you decide what’s actually worth saying,” Lortie reveals. The box and the tube were then built for two places: the box for the retail shelf, the tube for the beauty counter. The tube itself is unlined aluminium.

Where toothpaste is almost always sold on an open smile, Bastét’s images show the feeling of clean instead. “Images that provoke a clear feeling without the need to convey literal smiles or conventional imagery,” explains Di Domenico, who names Irving Penn, the photographer behind Clinique’s look through the 1980s and 1990s, as a reference for the still lifes, set against a “chic drama” of propping: the shoe, the silk glove and the items fallen out of a bag. Bastét launches with one tube, but Wedge has built the system to grow. “We built a system for future flavours and SKUs,” she adds. What it stages, for now, is the Bastét Ritual: four minutes, twice a day.