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Saturday, December 11, 2021
How the Toothpaste Got its Stripes
A mystery that captivated the internet has a simple answer. At least, that's what Colgate says.
A mystery that captivated the internet has a simple answer. At least, that's what Colgate says.
Haley Weiss, Staff Writer
December 10, 2021
(Inside Science) -- Remember as a kid sitting slack-jawed at a friend's birthday party, all as the county's cheapest magician sawed a lady in half? That's kind of what it feels like to watch Ryan Battistella squeeze tube after tube of toothpaste into the toilet on his TikTok account. In a series of three viral videos posted in late November, Batistella and a friend used a variety of techniques -- and profanities -- as they mixed up the contents of nearly half a dozen tubes of striped toothpaste, only to discover that when they squeezed the tubes, stripes still came out.
With each trial, they dug deeper and deeper into the mystery. What began as kneading an unopened tube before using it devolved into a frenzied Batistella cutting open a tube from the bottom to mix the contents with a knife, showing the homogenous grey contents to the camera before squeezing out -- you guessed it -- black-and-white striped toothpaste from the nozzle. There's a humor to watching two grown men become completely unraveled over tubes of Colgate Optic White (by the end of the third video, one of them was simply shrieking "It's a portal!" over and over), but their confusion didn't appear to be a bit. The creators were just as mystified as their audience...
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