Today while I was shopping, I went to grab the usual toothpaste I buy — Crest Complete (“Clean mint” gel flavor, since I prefer gel over paste) — but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the shelf. For a moment I thought it might have been discontinued in favor of splitting it into five more varieties. You see, while we once wanted toothpaste to simply remove plaque and keep our teeth clean, today a toothpaste is engineered more carefully than a NASA Mars probe, carefully designed to excel at a specific function (or two) and then marketed appropriately. What if you want a toothpaste to do more than those one or two specific functions? You could be like me and buy the “complete” version (hidden behind an employee stocking the shelf, as it turns out) or you could buy multiple pastes and turn your brushing routine into an elaborate ritual worthy of anthropological study.
It turns out Crest has 42 varieties of toothpaste. 42 varieties of toothpaste looks something like this:
Actually, that’s the U.S. site and even though it impressively lists 42 toothpastes, the type I buy is amazingly not among them. The Canadian site lists 45 varieties, including the one I use. 45! Madness! When aliens in the far-flung future examine the detritus of our dead civilization, they will puzzle and ponder over why we had five billion pastes to clean our teeth.