Next-Gen Toothpaste
“Toothbrush companies can offer me bendy necks and throw me into a hyperventilatious vomit-spasm with talk of “hard to reach places” but they know and I know that the very backs of the back of my back teeth are a mere two inches behind my lips and can be reached comfortably with the most inflexible, rusty steel rod they ever saw fit to stick bristles on. Toothpaste makers can talk up individual coloured sections of their toothpaste acting independently from other differently coloured sections but it’s all marketing malarkey designed to make sure we buy their toothpaste. All the while, making sure that their jazzy new product remains, at heart, simply toothpaste.”
The above paragraph comes from an article I wrote for the satirical toothpaste industry magazine Cavity Search that ran for over five hundred issues in the late eighties. At the time I believed that all the fancy new accoutrements that were being added to the toothpaste shelves were just window dressing designed to catch the eye of the sexually moribund househusband, resentful of sticky white paste shooting out of a vaguely phallic white tube that only served to remind him of his dire ejaculationless existence. I firmly held this conviction until just the other night, when I went into the bathroom to discover a box of Colgate Max Fresh with Cooling Crystals sitting beside the sink. Stand back, readers. Stand well back.
I’ll be honest with you; I gazed upon the box, which looked like a garish little sarcophagus for an Elton John doll, with a very cynical, dry old eye. I was completely unwilling to accept that this toothpaste could possibly achieve anything more than the good old Colgate that I used to brush my teeth with in the eighties, when our back teeth were three feet behind our lips and unreachable without assistance from toilet brush weilding abseilers. I picked up the box to see what grand claims were going to be made on the side of it with a world-weary and disproportionately showy growl.
Their pitch started off with a check list. Three things- Freshens and cleans your mouth. Check. Whiter teeth. Check. Fights cavities. Check.- Now, I’m not exactly a PCP abusing radical but that’s an awfully conservative approach to blowing my nipples through my hoodie with titillating toothpaste talk. It’s not like I expected anything more brutally candid- Is actually better than your good old bog standard toothpaste. - but they might have tried something just a wee bit more thrilling. Let us know if it’s good for one of toothpaste’s more unconventional uses, perhaps- Adds spice to intercourse when a pea sized amount is added to the tip of the penis. Check- I mean, you’d think they were selling you some plain old fluoride toothpaste that already does everything you could ever need it to do with this kind of talk.
I was ready to start smirking violently in the face of this deluded toothpaste packaging but Colgate quickly moved on to one of their heavy hitters- The 1st toothpaste infused with cooling crystals! “You know what’s so amazing about my thing? I’m the first ever to have my thing! Goodnight!” I mean, I’m just not smelling the folds of their scrotum here. First? Hitler was the first to blitz Britain but I wouldn’t want to brush my teeth with his moustache.
They bring out their second heavy hitter which, I realise, is a continuation of the sentence The 1st toothpaste infused with cooling crystals. It goes on- which dissolve completely as you brush. Now this is more like it. I was having visions of brushing my teeth and being left with an uncomfortable mouth full of jagged crystals; crystals that fall out of my mouth into my broth or onto corpses in open caskets as I lean in for a kiss. People do not like it when you allow things that resemble expensive gems and smell of mint to dribble out of your mouth onto their dead uncle’s forhead. Imagine your usual shtick, pretending that you don’t have a watch or a mobile phone so that you can ask a pretty girl the time, just to hear her voice, if you have an avalanche of crystals pouring out of the hole in your face! I was genuinely delighted to see that Colgate had thought through the ramifications of putting masses of crystals inside the mouths of average Britons.
The sentence went on with the third and final and unstoppable heavy hitter- For a whole new dimension of freshness. Boom! Knockout. I stood there stunned. If this were true… If they really could give me a whole new dimension of freshness, it would perhaps be the greatest invention since Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile. Now, I had my own ideas about how many dimensions of freshness I had at the time but I wanted a more impartial take on it. I put down the box and I called everyone this side of a restraining order to ask them how many dimensions of freshness they thought I had. The general consensus was that I had eight. Eight dimensions of freshness.
I went back to the bathroom and I brushed my teeth. At first I didn’t think the crystals were actually going to dissolve and I fell to the floor in a blood-forming scream-gasm-fit convulsion but they soon melted away in my mouth and as they did I felt an incredible sensation in my body. At first it was like a spiritual river flowing through me and it felt as though all my senses had been turned up to eleven. My eyes could see new colours. My nose could smell the stool of my forefathers. When I touched my wooden toilet roll holder I could feel the whole life story of the tree, from seed to noble Andrex accessory, in the tips of my fingers. And with my senses tuned to a frequency I didn’t know existed I felt a new unknown, inexplicable sense arrive in my body to join sight, sound, taste, smell, talking, sweating and the other ones. What was it, readers? It was a whole new dimension of freshness.
2 Responses to “Next-Gen Toothpaste”
Leave a Reply
Contact
Colgate Max Fresh with Cooling Crystals? Actually drugs.
So you’re finally in the bumpocket of Mr Colgate?
Let’s hope their next “toothpaste” can also clean consciences