The other night I was watching TV and my wife, unfortunately, had the remote.
Therefore I was forced to watch commercials. When I am in control, we only watch recored shows where I can fast forward past the commercials.
A commercial came on for Crest White Teeth Strips*. There were two young pretty models who had perfect, shining white teeth.
One said to the other,
Have you done the Tissue Test?
She then explained that you hold a white tissue next to your teeth and if your teeth are not as white as the tissue, you need this product.
For the record, I couldn’t see a difference. Both models had those super white/almost blue, perfect TV smiles.
But it got me thinking, this is a perfect example of why advertising is total bullshit.
For my entire life, people had mostly yellowish teeth.
Really young kids had teeth that had ridges on the bottom. Teens sometimes needed braces. Adults has teeth that were off white to yellow – depending on how old they were. (And really old people kept their teeth in a glass on the bathroom sink!)
The only people who had perfect teeth were movie stars.
Then sometime around 2010 I started to notice that all the millennials who worked with me had dazzlingly white teeth. On the rare occasions where I couldn’t avoid going to the mall, I saw tooth whitening kiosks. Even my dentist suggested I get a mouthpiece and use his high power tooth whitening gel.
I’m ashamed to admit, with all these dazzling white-toothed coworkers walking around my office, I felt like I had Quasimodo’s mouth.
So I listened to my dentist.
I tried it a few times. The mouthpiece had to stay in my mouth for hours and it made my gums ache. My teeth were a little bit whiter for a few weeks. But the effect was only temporary. My dentist explained that drinking coffee or tea makes everyone’s teeth yellow and that you needed to do the tooth whitening often. Maybe even several times a week.
What a racket!
- Let’s invent a problem that doesn’t exist.
- Then let’s create a product that only works temporarily so that people need to buy more forever.
- Then lets create an impossible standard – the Tissue Test.
And it’s working apparently.
Look around, you’ll see people with abnormally white teeth. You’ll see others wearing an invisaline-like clear mouthpiece while they whiten their teeth at work.
But it’s no longer working on me.
Hopefully it isn’t on you either.
Save your money.
*You might be thinking, “Aha Mr. Obvious, the commercial worked because you remembered it’s Crest.”
Not so fast my friend, I had to Google it and I’ll never buy it.