The Colgate Cap

As long as we're being honest here, I have to admit that I hate the Colgate toothpaste cap. Call me old fashioned, or a stick-in-the-mud, but I just think it's unnecessary, clumsy, and all-around asinine. Have you seen this cap? If you've never used this defective piece of wasted plastic, allow me to elaborate: unlike the normal, run-of-the-mill toothpaste cap, which twists off and can be removed from the paste tube, the Colgate cap flips, like an office garbage can lid, or a car hood.

And thus, the tragic flaw of the Colgate cap becomes apparent. The flipping action of the cap is intended, I assume, to be convenient. Colgate wants you to approach the tube of toothpaste thinking "Oh, I have a tooth brush in my left hand, and this tube in my right. What luck! I can hope this tube with one hand, just by flipping back the cap..." The only problem is that the cap itself is small, and it's range of flipping is weak. So if you are using one hand the entire time, as it is designed, you cannot control the cap and squeeze toothpaste out at the same time. While you may think that the toothpaste blast area is clear at first, the cap can often roll back to its more natural position, with the help of physics, and get caught in the minty crossfire!

What happens is that over time, with constant cap-toothpaste-collision, everything becomes gunky. Soon, the toothpaste oozes out from the protective bounds of the cap's lip, making the exterior bright green (or blue) and sticky. Now every time you want to use the paste, you have to scrub your hands really hard afterwards to get the stuff off!

Beyond all of this is the fact that the flip-cap on toothpaste is just unnatural. It might be easy to think of toothpaste like shampoo or body wash, which employs a similar cap, but it's quite different. Toothpaste needs to be kept in check, under control and tucked away from the outside world. More than likely, you're using shampoo in the shower, so therefore any escaped soap will just be washed away; with toothpaste, the tube just goes back in the drawer or cupboard and stays dry. It mingles with other hygienic items, and rarely becomes immersed in water long enough to get clean. Beyond all of that is the fact that the screw cap just makes sense.

The screw cap, as found on the Crest and Aquafresh toothpaste, allows the user to completely take the cap out of the equation, therefore avoiding any potential for toothpaste contact. Sure there are the incidents of cap loss (freshman year of college I dropped two caps in a row down the drain in my dorm room), but they are infrequent and provide a valuable learning opportunity. I'd rather drop a million caps down the drain that get toothpaste on my thumb from the flip-cap.

You know, just tonight I got toothpaste all over my thumb trying to open up that stupid cap. What a waste. Sure I guess I could screw off the flip-cap and just pretend that it's a Crest tube... but that would be like using a screwdriver to hammer a nail.