3 in 1 Protection For All The Family! (Aquafresh Fresh and Minty Toothpaste)

Member Name: andrewl

Product:	Aquafresh Fresh and Minty Toothpaste
Date:	03/09/09 (80 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tastes nice, cleans your teeth, cheap

Disadvantages: Might not be whitening enough for you

If you want 3 in 1 protection for all the family, anyone who's ever watched adverts over the last three decades will tell you, you need Aquafresh!

Toothpaste is one of life's essentials. While I'm generally very cynical about branding, there are two things in life worth spending a bit extra on. Toothpaste and loo roll. After those two, you might as well get the supermarket own brand.

As all those adverts say, plaque builds up on your teeth when you eat, which can lead to tooth decay unless you brush regularly with a good toothpaste. Remembering my GCSE science lessons as well, acid builds up in the mouth when you eat, and several hours thereafter, and brushing helps neutralise this acid, which can also damage your teeth. So brushing both treats and protects your teeth. Please pick me up here if I'm off on my dental knowledge, although the idea of anyone taking my opinion as a substitute for medical advice is pretty funny.

Anyway, you need toothpaste. And today we're looking at...

Aquafresh, Prince of Toothpastes
It says a lot about my childhood that a toothpaste was a major talking point at school. Gosh, we were a dull lot. My dentist specifically recommended my parents stop buying Colgate (then, if not now, the Ready Salted of toothpastes) as it was causing my young teeth to discolour.

Aquafresh was duly purchased and, with the odd detour to McCleans and Sensodyne, I've been brushing with it ever since.

The big USP (Unique Selling Point) of Aquafresh is of course the fact that it comes out in three neat stripes, even towards the bottom of the tube/pump (call me old-fashioned, but I get the tubes. They're slightly cheaper, and I don't live with anyone annoying enough to squeeze them in the middle).

Squeezing some out on to your toothbrush, there's a central white stripe, with red and blue stripes to either side. Like a little Tricolore staring up at you first thing in the morning. Perhaps Aquafresh brainwashed me into becoming a French teacher? Who can say?

Again, as a kid, the big question on the mind of any enquiring child was how they managed to keep the toothpaste in three distinct stripes like that. As the red and blue gels give the paste quite a solid appearance, I used to imagine a great long snake of striped toothpaste, coiled tightly inside the tube. The correct explanation was given on seminal Children's BBC show Corners by Doctor Who's Sophie Aldred in the late 1980s. Making the usual verbal contortions to avoid using the brandname on the commercial-free Beeb, she showed a cross-section, showing that the three different colours come out of three different sections of the packaging, meeting just inside the nozzle.

I wouldn't even mention this, but I still see people asking on Wiki answers and suchlike.Aquafresh's own packaging gives the breakdown as to what the stripes do:

Red stripe (BEER!) - strengthens gums
White stripe (BAND!)- protects teeth
Blue stripe (DRIP IRRIGATION PRODUCTS!) - freshens breath

Interestingly, given that I was introduced to this brand to stop my teeth being discoloured, whitening is not something that's mentioned, although other varieties of Aquafresh do have whitening properties. I must admit, that surprised me... but then it's probably the first time in twenty years that I'd bothered reading anything on the box other than the expiry date.

The brushing experience
Toothpaste is primarily a medical product, so this shouldn't make any difference, but it has to be said straight away that Aquafresh is very visually appealing with its bold contrasting colours. Spreading the requisite 'pea-sized amount' on my suitably moistened brush, I dive right in and start scrubbing away.

Despite a slightly more solid consistency than some toothpastes (I always thought Sensodyne looked particularly watery), Aquafresh quickly froths up once in the mouth and spreads a nice minty lather all across your pearly whites.

It tastes pretty good, too. Minty, but not over-poweringly so. More than enough to take the edge off the average hangover's death breath, but equally you're not cringing away from eating biscuits until two in the afternoon because of the sharp fresh tang still lurking in your nostrils.
Yeah, so it tastes good and makes for easy application. Is there much more that can be said about the experience without 'unnecessary detail'?


Come inside my mouth...

That was originally going to be my title, but someone would have moaned. Anyway. Your toothpaste choice is going to depend on your dental needs, which vary from person to person. I tend to use Aquafresh because of the discolouring problem when I was a kid (although interestingly I notice now that the variety I use makes no pretence of having special whitening powers). Beyond that, I'll spare you detailed descriptions of the inside of my mouth - let's just say none missing, two fillings, slightly weak gums, stand back if I've eaten a kebab the night before.

If this fairly generic set of dental circumstances also applies to you, maybe you should give Aquafresh a shot. The fact that I've had no serious dental problems other than two very small fillings should also be a bit of an endorsement, I suppose.


Two useful things

According to the website for Aquafresh, their Fresh and Minty variety is both gluten free, and contains no latex (and neither does the packaging), which is good news if you have intolerances to either of those things. I really couldn't say whether gluten is a popular ingredient of other toothpastes, though.

Bottom line?

Aquafresh is a totally decent toothpaste, perked up by its marketeer's dream of the three distinctive stripes. It's also competitively priced, at around £1 for a standard 100ml, which compares well with the £2 or so you can pay for other brands. As I said from the outset, however, toothpaste is one of those essentials in life on which you really should not stint, so if you need more whitening in your toothpaste, or have highly sensitive teeth, or if you have really bad breath (there, I said it), perhaps you should look elsewhere - or at least at one of Aquafresh's other varieties.

Summary: 3 in 1 protection for all the family...