Is Your Toothpaste Tube Safe?

In our house we all have our own personal tubes of tooth paste since we all brush our teeth in our own bathrooms. As I was squeezing my squirt of paste across my bristles I got to thinking about how gross our toothpaste was a kid. In our very old house we had very few bathrooms, none that could be considered luxurious by any stretch of the imagination. I shared the worst bathroom with my two sisters. We had one tiny sink where our tooth brushes all lay on the laminate covered counter with one usually well squeezed tube of Crest tooth paste.

It never seemed to matter how old the tooth paste was, it was always squeezed in the middle. Back in the sixties toothpaste tubes were a kind of bendable metal and once you mashed the middle up it was hard to squeeze the tooth paste from the far end to the cap opening. We never learned, we squeezed the middle first every time.

Putting the cap on the tooth paste was also something we were not good at. Given the nine years age difference it would be a lifetime before that was a skill we all had. So when you came in at bedtime there was a better than fifty-fifty shot that there would be some caked paste seal on the end and you had to squeeze extra hard to give enough pressure to break through the tough hardened paste.

One thing for sure was we all dragged our own tooth brushes against the end of the cap while we were trying to catch the paste as it came out. Now that I live in a Covid world and look at everything in terms of what their potential viral load might be, I look at shared tooth paste tubes as a ground zero for spreading germs.

I am thankful that in our house we all have always had our own tooth paste, but I think it was a proximity issue rather than a cleanliness one. I am wondering how many of you shared tooth paste with your siblings? If you have a house full of children now do they each have their own toothpaste? If they share a bathroom even if they have their own tubes do they not accidentally use someone else’s?

Seems like tooth paste manufacturers should make a place on the tube to write you name. Perhaps we could cut down on the sharing of the common cold if everyone had their own tooth paste. Maybe I have this all wrong. I have never heard of people sharing toothpaste being singled out for transmission of anything. If it had I am certain that the marketing departments at Crest and Colgate would tell us to buy a tube for every member of the house. Or perhaps they don’t want to imply that germs could live on the tube. Someone please tell me the answer to my questions about the cleanliness of our toothpaste.