Jonathon Wardman

Those new toothpaste tubes

I’ve just started on a new tube of toothpaste. It’s the same kind of toothpaste as my old tube — Colgate Total Advanced Whitening — but they have changed the tube design in the most annoying way.

We are short of space on our sink, and Dana and I share a little plastic cup to keep our toothbrushes and toothpaste in. This used to work fine as there was plenty of space for two brushes and two tubes of toothpaste. Sometimes there was a problem with balance, especially when one of the tubes was nearing the end, but generally it was a perfectly satisfactory setup. But then, for some reason, Colgate came along and made the caps on their toothpaste tubes huge…

It seems they think that people want their toothpaste tubes to be self-supporting — that by giving the tubes a big cap they can stand on their own single big foot — but I really don’t see it as an improvement. The problem we have now is that the majority of space in our little toothbrush cup will be taken up by the lid of the toothpaste. Once we both get on to our new tubes the problem will be serious. Once we’re down to the bottom of our tubes and they start to flop under the weight of their new caps the balance problem will be greatly increased too.

People have been managing to find a way to store their toothpaste — on it’s side, in a cup — for years. This is hardly a revolutionary design. Were the old style caps really so bad?