The Last Word On Nothing

I wrote this in 2021 and originally published it in my newsletter. Almost two years later, I am still thinking about it, so please, if you know Crest’s copywriters, please reach out.

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For unobservant people (me), product labels are background noise. I don’t pay much attention to the text on a package of toilet paper or what’s written on the various boxes and cans I bring home from the grocery store, though I do think about this can of peas all the time. My partner, on the other hand, reads everything closely. If there’s anything on the dining table while we’re having a meal — a flier, the wrapper around takeout chopsticks — he’ll reflexively read it. So it did not surprise me at all when he showed me the text on our toothpaste tube.

“What does this even mean?” he asked with incredulity, pointing at a phrase highlighted in its own little white box: “Protects against areas dentists check most.”

Upon first read, it seemed innocuous: protects! dentists! Alongside it were other reassuring, toothpaste-related words: anticavity, clean mint, pro-health, freshens breath. My brain was reassured that yes, here is toothpaste that does all the normal toothpaste stuff. But then I realized the actual content of the phrase makes no sense. What are the areas dentists check most, anyway? Like… the teeth? The gums? The whole mouth? Whenever I go to the dentist they do check all those things. The gum checking is the worst, because the dentist will rattle off a bunch of numbers to the assistant, which I feel vaguely judged by even though I don’t understand if they’re good or bad.

But I digress. What’s more mysterious than these “areas” is what the toothpaste claims to do for them. How does one protect against areas? I can imagine protecting areas dentists check most; mouth protection seems good. But to protect against areas? This implies there are areas that dentists check which you need protection from. Perhaps the tongue, an area my dentist sometimes checks, is in fact a dangerous area and the toothpaste does something to protect me against it.

We first encountered this toothpaste in April and I have been thinking about it ever since. “Time to protect against areas,” N will sometimes say before brushing his teeth, and though it’s been months, it makes me laugh every time. For a week, I toyed with the idea of doing some investigative toothpaste journalism. Who is the poor copywriter who shat out this terrible copy? Who signs off on toothpaste tube copy, if anyone, and were they just asleep at the wheel that day at work? Does anyone at Crest realize that this sentence makes no sense? For what it’s worth, we bought more of the same toothpaste recently and it had the same text, which suggests it’s probably standard copy, not a one-time error.

In a way, this feels peak 2020s United States: gesture at a nice idea (protects! dentists!), and hope that people don’t look too closely to notice that it has no substance. Meanwhile, no one’s at the helm to make a simple and small correction to an obvious mistake, or, even worse, they don’t think it matters enough to get things right, because who cares?