Y’all, I can’t even think up a title for this entry, so you’re just gonna have to deal with the toothpaste situation.
As am I.
I’ve got kind of a history of weird toothpaste-related issues with the Wild Oats (now Whole Foods) down on 44th & Main. There was, as you can go back and read, the incident where the one gal who used to work there informed me that my toothpaste was once used for Nazi mind-control experiments.
There’s also the issue of the toothpaste migrating around. They seem to willy-nilly move the shelves of toothpaste every few months or so, possibly in tune with the equinoxes and solstices, possibly just because the store is so tiny you have to grease up and slide in sideways to shop. Seriously, the store is extraordinarily “bijou” therefore their selection of various goods is necessarily limited and anything that isn’t a regular seller doesn’t get carried. That’s just how grocery stores work anyway, and especially ones with such limited floorspace.
So, the toothpaste I’ve been using since god-knows-when-in-the-mid-1990s was Tom’s Of Main, Cinnamint flavor, with fluoride. Apparently, they no longer offer Cinnamint with fluoride. You can only get their propolis & myrrh fake-o non-fluoride-having shitty toothpaste in the Cinnamint flavor. Suck! (why yes, I do feel unusually strongly about my toothpaste options). I also feel that toothpaste without fluoride is just no damn good at all.
The Cinnamon-Clove flavor is pretty good, but it’s only available in their Whole Care which is a whitening toothpaste, and I don’t really want to harsh my enamel any more than it already suffers, considering.
Soooo…my options…
I don’t really like minty toothpaste…that is why I started with the Cinnamint in the first place. I believe that it is imperative that toothpaste have fluoride. I don’t want “whitening” ’cause my teeth are already under abrasive forces they don’t really need. So, what am I left with?
Well, what I was left with this time around was this stuff in the fennel flavor, and I am here to tell you that I will be pursuing other options after we work our way through this tube of toothpaste.
It is ass-nasty and I’m not joking you. This is some dee-sgusting toothpaste! This one is for people who are very-very-afwaid of Sodium Laurel Sulfate, which is the stuff that makes your toothpaste, shampoo, etc. get foamy when agitated.
According to the Tom’s folks:
The foaming properties of glycyrrhizin (from purified licorice root) replace the need for SLS (which may, for some people, occasionally be irritating) or an SLS alternative.
Be all that as it may, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t foam. It really doesn’t. So I end up using twice as much to feel like I’ve done something. Also, it is kind of mushy, and the flavor is truly shocking. I mean, it tastes slightly dirt-y, slightly mold-y, and very sickeningly sweet. It’s even grosser than the Ginger flavor that Tom’s used to offer which just tasted like dirt, but not mold and wasn’t cloyingly sweet. If it were even slightly more disgusting, I’d have just thrown the tube away and chalked it up to a bad lesson learned the hard way. But we’re also talkin’ about a $5.25 tube of toothpaste, which doesn’t strictly grow on trees, so I reckon I’ll just tough it out and seek out a better alternative after we use it up.
I expect I’m going to be on the lookout for a new cinnamon toothpaste that doesn’t suck. Crest’s Cinnamon products suck, if the sample tubes of their “Whitening Expressions” that I got from my dentist are anything to go by. If it weren’t flaming red and the tube didn’t say CINNAMON all over it in big letters, I’d have never guessed that was what it was getting at. It’s just like the old Closeup disappointment from many years past. Supposedly they had a cinnamon flavor, but it didn’t seem to even hint at anything other than BURN YOUR LIPS OFF MINTYMINTMINTMINT!
Probably I ought to start looking around now, and see if I can’t find some toothpaste that isn’t gross, whitening, hideously expensive, or devoid of precious, precious fluoride.
Just return it. No questions asked. I’ll see if we have the flavor here at Metcalf.
Thanks for the tip, Jeff, but the dealio is that Tom’s of Maine doesn’t offer Cinnamint in the plain fluoride formula anymore, which is why I need to start looking for a whole new toothpaste option.
And I figure I’ll just use up this crappy one and then find a different brand.
Are sweet flavors out? I use the Tom’s kids’ toothpaste in strawberry because the mint is way too intense for me (and, the next day, leaves me with dogs’ breath). I think there is also mango. I would describe the strawberry as inoffensive; for some people it might not feel breath-freshening enough.
If you want to give it a try, though, read the box carefully, as there are a fluoride-free *and* a fluoride version, and the boxes look very similar to one another. I get S. the fluoride-free and I’m always accidentally using his.
i thought there is flouride in any toothpaste? at least here in germany it is.
good luck on toothpaste hunting! i actually can’t believe you got a fennel flavored toothpaste. yuck! hang in there!
about the foaming – i heard that we are so accustomed to foaming as a sign of cleaning that people feel like a non-foamy toothpaste (or shampoo) does not clean that well. it’s not true but we want foam!
franzi
I may try that out next time around. So long as it is not minty, whitening, or fluoride-free, it’s a contender.