How Toothpaste Got Its Stripes
If you always assumed striped toothpaste was the work of a magic devil, assume again. It turns out it's the work of a little extended pipe inside the tube that merges the different colored substances onto the toothpaste highway and straight onto your brush. That mechanical trick is half a century old, however; modern varieties sometimes just come that way, as this frozen toothpaste photo that's been around for a while demonstrates.
"How they get Stripes on Toothpaste" [BBC via buzzblog]
(Photo: mauren veras)
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Comments:
I'm surprised that there are no cake decorator tubes that have this feature yet.
@pattiesmart: Wow, aren't you just the super smartiest! You even chose a user name to highlight how smart you are, so that everyone can know right away that you are smart!!
@Nighthawke: The way a similar effect is created is by smearing a stripe of one color in a decorating bag using an icing spatula, then filling the bag with the 2nd color. You can even do a couple stripes of color for a rainbow effect. IMO, I think most cakes are decorated far too loudly as it is, and I don't want icing that looks like toothpaste (or rainbows). But just in case you were wondering how you could get an Aquafresh effect on your next cake, there you go. For the full toothpaste effect, may I suggest mint-flavored buttercream?
@pattiesmart: I'd prefer to assume you just spend WAY more time analyzing your toothpaste tube. I just use it and don't fret over how the magic colors come out.
@ChuckECheese: When I was about to turn eight, my mom, the baker, asked me what kind of cake I wanted for my birthday.
I responded that I wanted strawberry cake, with puple, pink, and turquoise marbled frosting.
(In my defense, it was the 1980s. And I was in second grade.)
She did a fantastic marbled effect using exactly the technique you describe. I've played with it a bit from time to time, to please small children or make intentionally ugly cakes, but yeah, I wouldn't do it often. ;)
For a great site for all ages:[www.madehow.com]
You will spend hours there.
There is even an almost deathly abandoned forum:
[www.madehow.com]
@stanner: Trying to... span the gap and bring commenters together in harmony...
Dammit, I just can't do it.
@econobiker: That's a great site. However, I was unable to spend hours there, because after I skimmed interesting parts of several articles, I starting getting a message that "excessive page views indicating bot-like behavior" meant that I was locked out of the site. Never seen that before!
The page helpfully suggested I "slow down my crawler" to avoid blocking other users. Not sure my brain has ever been referred to as a "crawler" before :P
Bite your tongue, sir! I prefer to believe in the toothpaste fairy!
That's kind of interesting. I never wondered about it, but it's neat to know.
Mr. Rogers and King Friday showed a video of this technique somewhere around the time I decided that Lady Whateverhername was a beige asshole.
@pattiesmart: My father actually gets annoyed/angry with me for squeezing the toothpaste from the middle. He says I will screw up the stripes.
I think his concern is because Aquafresh used to have three colours, and list three features, each feature printed in one of those colours, so perhaps if I mashed the tube we wouldn't get tartar protection.
Perhaps he saw some moral failing in squeezing it from the middle (OCD does run in the family) and was trying to trick me into breaking this world-destroying habit. Or perhaps he really does think they're in there like that.
@Cantras: To clarify: huh, the frozen toothpaste picture looks like aquafresh. I wonder if they used the special pipes at one point, though, because all my father's concern did was give me an intense desire to see if it was possible, mashing and twisting the tube, and we still had stripes if i recall correctly.
Um, people actually didn't know that? I already knew that. But maybe I'm just smarter than the average bear.