2008-05-06

Mentadon't

I've finally had my fill of Mentadent toothpaste.

If you're not familiar with the product, it capitalizes on the idea that there's a dental benefit to brushing with a combination of baking soda and peroxide. The toothpaste is packaged in these rigid, two-chambered packages. You insert one into a dispenser, and as you push down on the top, two plungers push up on the two chambers, dispensing equal amounts of a blue and a white gel, presumably a baking soda and a peroxide formula.

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, it doesn't always work as smoothly as all that. Typically, because of an air bubble or something, at the start of a new package, one side will be short relative to the other, resulting in a couple days of all blue or all white. That, in and of itself, isn't too bad (except that it's usually the white side that's short, resulting in all blue, and the blue doesn't have the fresh taste that the white does).

The past two packages have been worse than normal, though. The former, the blue side had liquefied. Instead of a blue gel, out came a blue watery substance. I don't know if this was good or bad by itself — we did brush with it anyway, and for all I know probably ended up rotting our teeth with it — but when blue liquid started to show through the seams of the package (obviously designed to contain a gel, not water), it had to go, barely used.

The latter has seemed to defy laws of reality. For the entire life of the package, when dispensing the product, a good 3-4 inches of blue gel will come out for every half inch of white. I can understand this happening if they were filled unevenly, at the start of the package, but I would think at some point, eventually, it would even out. Unless I've been applying uneven pressure while pushing down on the dispenser — but since the thing is almost empty at this point, that kind of uneven pressure would eventually result in something like a 30° tilt.

The hassle just isn't worth it anymore. Sorry, Mentadent, but I just want a tube of toothpaste. This is just too complicated.

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