Toothpaste through the decades, from tube concept to the fluoride breakthrough (1892)

People have been scrubbing their teeth with something for thousands of years, but the toothpaste squeezed from a tube is a relatively recent invention. Tooth powders and pastes go back to ancient Egypt, where people used crushed bone, ash and other abrasives.

The version Americans grew up with — minty, foamy, sold in a tube — only took shape in the late 1800s, and the path from there to the drugstore shelf runs through some surprising chemistry and a fair amount of dentist-recommended hair, ammonia and even radioactive thorium.

Colgate began mass-producing toothpaste in jars in 1873, but the jar itself was a problem. Dentist Washington Sheffield thought it unsanitary for a family to keep dipping toothbrushes into the same container (indeed!), so in 1892 he developed the first collapsible toothpaste tube, reportedly inspired by the metal tubes artists used for paint.

Colgate adopted the tube format a few years later, and it became the industry standard almost overnight. Early formulas relied on soap as a cleaning agent, with chalk, charcoal or pumice added for abrasion, and dentists of the era promoted their own house brands and powders with the kind of confidence that wouldn’t survive a modern FDA review.

The early 1900s brought a wave of competing dentifrices, each claiming its own scientific edge. Pepsodent, launched in 1915, built an entire ad campaign around removing a “film” on teeth using an ingredient called Irium, which turned out to be plain sodium lauryl sulfate, a foaming agent rather than a medical breakthrough.

Forhan’s marketed itself as a cure for gum disease. Ipana leaned on a fictional gum ailment called “pink toothbrush.” None of these claims held up particularly well, but the marketing worked, and dentifrice sales boomed through the 1920s and 1930s as radio sponsorships put brand names in front of millions of listeners.

The real shift came after World War II, when synthetic detergents replaced soap as the main cleaning agent, producing the smoother, foamier paste familiar today. Fluoride research, which had been underway in fits and starts since the 1890s, finally led somewhere useful. Procter & Gamble spent the early 1950s working with Indiana University researcher Joseph Muhler, and the resulting product, Crest with Fluoristan, launched nationally in 1956.

VIDEO  |  Ipana toothpaste commercial (1950s)

Early sales lagged behind cosmetic-focused competitors like Gleem, but everything changed in 1960, when the American Dental Association granted Crest its first-ever seal of approval for a fluoride toothpaste. Crest’s sales nearly tripled within two years, and rival brands scrambled to add fluoride of their own. Colgate didn’t get its ADA endorsement until 1969.

From there, toothpaste innovation slowed to incremental tweaks rather than fundamental change. Striped toothpaste arrived in the 1960s as a packaging novelty, gel formulas showed up in the 1970s and 1980s, and whitening agents entered the picture in the mid-1980s as cosmetic appeal became as much a selling point as cavity prevention had been a generation earlier.

VIDEO  |  1970s Crest commercial

By the 1990s, the basic chemistry (fluoride, abrasives, detergent) had been settled for decades, and most “innovation” amounted to new flavors, packaging gimmicks and incremental whitening claims layered onto a formula that hadn’t changed much since the Crest breakthrough.

Here, we have a collection of toothpaste advertising and packaging spanning more than a century, from Dr Lyon’s tooth powder in the 1890s through the gel tubes and pump dispensers of the 1980s and 1990s. The photos trace how brands like Colgate, Ipana, Pepsodent and Crest competed for bathroom counter space across generations.