You’ve probably wondered about this before and then forgotten to ask anyone about it. Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. Mint-flavored toothpaste is one of the childhood mysteries we must unlock before we finally get to adulthood. Or, in the case of fully adult people who genuinely don’t know, just another thing we can finally get the answer to after years of not asking the question.
If you’ve thought about it before, you’ve probably asked yourself why toothpaste couldn’t have been BBQ, bacon, cupcake, or dill-flavored. Or something fruity like orange—perhaps even bubblegum. Right? The truth is, a company called Accoutrements did do it. However, it didn’t get the rave reviews one could expect from such a unique idea. It made for a great gag gift, sure. It was also something that some children enjoyed. They even created a bacon floss out of it.
How did mint come to be the flavor of choice, though? Who woke up and suddenly decided that toothpaste needed to be mint-flavored? Let’s start from the beginning and find out.
Then
According to Catalina Lee, the Director of Colgate Worldwide, mint came to be the flavor of choice for their toothpaste because one of its active ingredients includes Menthol. This element somehow tricks the brain into creating this icy and refreshing sensation that makes everyone feel clean in their mouths.
Colgate began to use North American peppermint and spearmint oil in the 1800s in the manufacture of their toothpaste. The early 20th century brought us the first mass-marketed mint-flavored toothpaste, and the rest, as they say, is history. Ever since they started, people have widely accepted it to be the norm flavor for toothpaste. After all, it’s been some years since they started doing it, and they’re still doing it now. They must have done something right.
The Egyptians from 500 B.C. were one of the first who started using a form of paste for teeth cleaning. Around the same time, the Ancient Romans and Greeks also began to use toothpaste to clean their teeth. The Chinese, with their creativity, took it to a whole new level by using different substances like ginseng, herbal mints, and salt to freshen their mouths.
Now
The flavor of toothpaste nowadays is largely dependent on the fact that the teeth-brushing routine is already dull enough without adding any sort of flavor to the cleaning product. Without mint or any of the flavors that Accoutrements added to their toothpaste, we’ll probably avoid brushing our teeth because of the bitter, metallic, bitter, and overall unpleasant taste of flavorless toothpaste.
Toothpaste for children is amazingly flavored, too. They have strawberries, watermelon, bubblegum, and even chocolate-flavored ones. This helps the kids look forward to brushing their teeth. The taste of their toothpaste motivates them to brush their teeth with frequency until it becomes an ingrained habit, even without the food-flavored toothpaste.
No matter how good kids’ toothpaste tastes, nothing beats the freshness and sense of cleanness that mint-flavored ones give you. Even kids want to switch to mint toothpaste once they get to a certain age. Spearmint, wintergreen, and mint are still the favorite toothpaste flavor of just about everyone. Even those who are open to toothpaste flavored like clove, vanilla, anise, and cinnamon prefer to have mint at the end of the day.
Do you like it?
It’s not a requirement for anyone’s toothpaste to taste like mint, however. It all depends on what you like, what makes your mouth feel fresh, and what makes you feel confident enough to talk and smile the whole day. If that’s mint, you’re not alone. The majority of people in the world prefer mint. After all, it has had such a long history as the frontrunner for toothpaste flavor that perhaps people have gotten used to it.
Or perhaps its refreshing taste and the way it makes us feel clean after brushing our teeth is the reason. Different sensory receptors in our mouths react to different stimuli. In the presence of cold temperatures, one specific receptor tells our brain that our mouths feel cold. That same receptor also happens to react in the presence of mint. This is why, whenever we use mint-flavored toothpaste, our brains are tricked about how our mouths feel cool and clean.
Is mint healthier than other flavors?
Contrary to popular belief, there are no health benefits to mint-flavored toothpaste. Sure, mint, on its own, has its own set of merits. However, the amount of mint used to make toothpaste mint-flavored isn’t enough to warrant health benefits. It’s just flavor, just like bacon, bubblegum, or citrus.
Advertising genius
While mint-flavored toothpaste has been around for centuries, it was never really more or less popular than other toothpaste flavors like honey, ginseng, lemon, and a mixture of various herbs. That is until Claude C. Hopkins happened. He was an advertising executive, and his ad campaign for Pepsodent mint toothpaste took off. His ad promised to make the customers’ smiles more beautiful if they used mint toothpaste. Then he went ahead and created the need by making people feel like they’re missing out if they didn’t use the product.
To call it a successful ad would not be a lie. The ad campaign started the mint toothpaste revolution. In truth, it was ultimately the mint flavor that got people hooked. It made everyone’s mouths feel cleaner. This fact created a dependency and an urgency for mint toothpaste for consumers back then. The fact that they were told that their teeth were “dingy” by the Hopkins ad if they didn’t use the Pepsodent mint toothpaste just created more demand.
Hopkin’s ad campaign not only made mint-flavored toothpaste a worldwide hit—but it also created the daily brushing habit. Even Listerine and Lifesaver promoted themselves along the same lines.
Finally, after a decade’s worth of research, competing toothpaste companies discovered what made Pepsodent so famous—mint. This is why it’s near impossible to find toothpaste without some kind of ‘minty’ additive that makes our mouth feel cool and clean.