Listerine is very popular as mouthwash. Most of us buy products under the influence of advertising and with the faith that a company of repute must be selling good quality products. I also bought;Listerine’ under this impression. But then one of my friend told me about its history and ingredients and advised me to avoid it. I, then started searching for the right information and in a book’Freakonmics’ by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, I found the facts, which forced me to discontinue its use.
I am sharing with you the extract from this book, - "Listerine, for instance, was invented in the nineteenth century as powerful surgical antiseptic. It was later sold, in distilled form, as both a floor cleaner and a cure for gonorrhea. But it wasn’t a runaway success until the 1920s, when it was pitched as a solution for "chronic halitosis"— a then obscure medical term for bad breath. Listerine’s new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate’s rotten breath. "Can I be happy with him in spite of that?" one maiden asked herself. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered such a catastrophe. But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, "Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis." In just seven years, the company’s revenues rose from$115, 000 to more than$8 million."
Now its up to you to decide what we are being sold in the name of mouth freshener. I have abstained myself from using it. You are intelligent enough to make your own decision