Colour Codes On Tooth Paste Tube

Nobody likes going to the dentist, but if you take good care of your teeth between visits, the cleaning will go easier.

You may have seen this alert on your Facebook page, shared by friends: color coding on products we use all the time and what it means.

The meaning of the colors on the bottom of toothpaste tubes:

Black square = Pure Chemical
Green square = Natural
Blue square = Natural + Medicine
Red square = Natural + Chemical composition

The claim about these indicators is completely wrong.

According to this bit of online lore, the colored squares or rectangular bars found on the crimp at the closed end of toothpaste tubes signify the composition of the product contained therein: whether its ingredients are “natural” or “chemical,” and whether the toothpaste includes “medicine.” (These terms are really too vague to be useful, as even “natural” products are made up of “chemicals,” and “medicine” is toonon-specificterm to be informative.)

However, those colored squares on the crimps of those tubes have nothing to do with the formulation of the toothpaste inside. They’re an artifact of the manufacturing process known as “eye marks” or “color marks", printed marks that can be read by light beam sensors and typically identify where product packaging is to be cut or folded as connected units stream through machinery at high speed.

Eye mark: A printed rectangular mark most often found along the edge of webstock that can be identified by an electric eye. The mark identifies a point on the web where an individual package is to be cut.

The colors of eye mark registers are not limited to the ones mentioned above (and may not necessarily be visible on the finished product), and the different colors simply signify different types of packaging or different types of sensors.

The best way to ascertain the composition of a given brand of toothpaste is by reading the ingredients information printed on the toothpaste box and/or tube.