Anyone get confused about the types of toothpaste flavors? I like spearmint and wintergreen, but not peppermint. anyway there has to be a reason there is no longer a real flavor to these things and everyone has their own different words.
I called Glaxo about a faulty tube and when they sent me a replacement they could not give me my same flavor but another one. Further they could not discuss how the flavrors were made, because it was proprietary. So you can’t have a preferred flavor. They won’t let you.
anyway there has to be a reason there is no longer a real flavor to these things and everyone has their own different words.
Labeling laws don’t require anything more than “flavor” as an ingredient.
It should also be noted that the reason toothpaste is mostly no longer sold by flavor is that Aquafresh wants you to believe that their “Pure breath formula” will “neutralize bad breath odors” and not that it is merely some version of peppermint flavor. If they were all labeled as “peppermint” you might believe they’re all the same and no marketing department will stand for that.
Since this is more of an informal poll about personal preferences and potential confusion than it is a factual question, let’s move this to IMHO, our home for informal polls and the sharing of experiences and opinions.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
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Actually, I think the reason they make so many flavors and variations isn’t because people prefer one flavor over another. It’s so they can package their product in different colors, and then put a clause in their marketing contract requiring the store to place each colored package in its own row on the shelf.
The more rows of shelf space , the more visibility for their logo, and more sales. Flavor is just a psychological ploy to fool us consumers.
They’re also over the top and too amped up for my taste. Mint “blast”, mint “rush”, mint “smack-in-the-head”… Too aggressively minty and uncomfortable on my tongue. (I use steroid inhalers for my asthma, and they leave my mouth slightly tender. Probably subclinical thrush, despite eating yogurt multiple times a day. My dentist is looking into good treatment/preventative options. Sorry if that’s TMI.)
So I use Crest’s orange flavor or Tom’s clove/cinnamon flavor. If all else fails, children’s fluoride toothpastes have a number of non-mint, non-bubblegum (ugh) options.
The flavors are not consistent over time, they have names that are impossible to apply meanings to in terms of taste. I was loyal to Crest most of my life and knew how it tasted. There is no way to be sure of what you’re buying in these.
When I asked Glaxo what kind of flavor I was going to get, because I found it confusing, the rep said she could not tell me about it because it was “proprietary”. To me that’s strange.
I think** Ornery Bob** nailed it- it’s a marketing thing. If they market their toothpaste as Cavity fighting “Hypermint” flavor, and use a lab-created mint-oid flavoring, then that’s something proprietary that nobody else has.
By comparison, if they marketed “Cavity Fighting Spearmint”, then anyone with some essential oils, hydrated silica, sodium lauryl sulfate and sodium flouride could compete directly with them, since there aren’t any real ways to identify and measure toothpaste performance for the average consumer, but flavor is one of the few things that people can definitely make judgments about.
So it’s nebulous claims like “whitening” or “extra smoothness” or whatever, combined with proprietary flavors that let one toothpaste be differentiated (and hopefully priced higher) from the rest.
Yuk. I remember the early Crest, back when it was what every dentist gave your parents at the end of your checkup. Great marketing technique, I’ll give them that. Toothpaste straight from the dentist’s hand. What parent isn’t going to insist their child use it? But it was just so awful tasting I could never embrace it. I remember the texture as fairly unpleasant, too. As soon as I had a voice in what toothpaste I used, I chose Pepsident. Now, I just use whatever is on sale. They all taste pretty much alike - aggressively, generically MINTY.
Does anyone remember the ghastly black charcoal toothpaste they once sold? I haven’t seen it in decades, but it was pretty frightening and horrible tasting. I can remember my grandfather using it as it was supposed to remove smoking stains from your teeth.
