Needed toothpaste today and noticed many of those discount/$2 type shops sell tubes of Colgate toothpaste for two dollars.
The packs look pretty much the same as the ones Coles/Woolworths sell for 3x the price with one difference, these are made in Asian countries (China, Thailand) and this is printed on the box.
Has anybody bought these cheap tubes of Colgate and noticed any difference to the regular Made in Australia variety?
For the record I bought my Colgate from Coles :)
Ahhhhh yes! I agree, I don't mind a bit of crunch to remove the plaque, but I do like to have the enamel stuck to my teeth, rather than my toothbrush :o\
This is just FUD. There is no perceivable difference between the Colgate toothpaste. This is like the people in QLD few years ago, whining about how their now-fluoridated tap water now tastes like metal. Turns out there was a clerical mistake so the fluoridation was delayed for a week, and they were bitching about the exact same water they've been drinking for decades.
I'd put money down saying you can't do the Pepsi Taste Test between this Asian Colgate and that you purchase at any pharmacy. The 'sand' texture is simply cognitive bias from the perception of inferior quality.
Which Coles/Woolworths sell tooth paste for $6?
Colgate do not make toothpaste in Australia no more. I get Cedel toothpaste which is made in Australia. I think its $2.40.
I would rather buy Australian toothpaste and keep jobs here. Plus Australian toothpaste most of the time is cheaper then all that Chinese/Thailand crap, so I have no idea why you would go out of you're way to get Chinese/Thailand toothpaste.
I'm curious how many jobs you think are "saved" by manufacturing toothpaste in Australia.
Probably not much but if we let every small company go off shore or run out of money then we see the effect of not supporting Australian companies/products, even if those companies may not employ many people.
Not sure why I got down voted for wanting others to buy Australian toothpaste? You don't have to if you don't want to…
I up voted you. I agree with keeping jobs local first. Although sometimes it does cost too much.
At least buying from asian grocery is support local business.
If I have choice I will avoid coles/woolthworth….
Is the entire product made here or just the bulk toothpaste (from ??) prepared for retail marketing?
Do you mean let's keep the low value adding manufacturing jobs in Australia rather than provide work opportunities for people in third world countries who would like to earn money to provide the basic amenities for their families that we in Australia take for granted?
Try Indian CloseUP from BigW, pretty good
http://www.getcloseup.com.au/faqs/
http://www.pental.com.au/our-brands/oral-care/close-up-tooth…
Isn't that that red stuff? I thought it disappeared years ago. There's something nasty in that stuff… Every time I used it, within a couple of days I would get mouth ulcers!
if I am not wrong Indian dental standard are at par with ADA and FDA
Franklins are doing macclean extreme clean white/fresh for $2.40~
Its almost 50% off, similar to when woolies or coles has a deal on it
Should be like $4.50 originally
Wow, are those who commented Asian Colgate is "crunchy" serious? :-O
I'd have thought a respectable company like Colgate would have better quality control than that.
The grey import COLGATE toothpaste doesn't feel or taste any different. I rang Colgate about it several years ago. I'd bought cheap stuff from a junk shop and wanted to know what gives with all the chinese text on the tube. They told me they were grey imports and asked for the store where I bought it. They also said the fluoride content is higher in imported toothpaste and therefore it should not be used with children. (If it isn't safe for kids, then it's not safe for adults either, so I stopped buying it.)
Not safe for Australia but safe for Asia?
unless your kids are eating the whole tube then i think you are over-reacting.
maybe you should talk to your dentist…
too much fluoride can harm young kids teeth… even the with the low-fluoride kid's versions, you're only supposed to use a very small amount for kids under 5…
The Thai colgate does have a different taste. It also has a stronger burn. If you've ever travelled to SE Asia it's similiar to that Daryl? toothpaste with the blackface logo. That's what the toothpastes generally taste like in that region.
Darlie toothpaste, formerly known as Darkie Toothpaste. They really dose that stuff up with the peppermint oil, just about burns your teeth off at the stumps. I suppose thats what you get for cleaning your teeth with an ethnic stereotype.
Its 'safe' for children in that there won't be any serious health effects. To much fluoride when teeth are developing can cause a yellowish-brown discolouration of the teeth. The toothpaste plus the flouride in our water probably stack up to being above the rather arbitrary recommended fluoride dose for children set by the relevant health body in Australia.
Since I am guessing you aren't growing new teeth I wouldn't worry about to much fluoride.
"If it isn't safe for kids, then it's not safe for adults either"
This isn't actually true.
Consider aspirin which, in children, may cause Reye's syndrome but would almost never cause Reye's in adults (I can't even find a case dated more recently than the 80s.)
Consider the Pharmacy Guild's recent decision to cease common cold&flu medications (such as Demazin or Dimetapp) to children younger than 6, but use of the same medications is undoubtedly safe in adults.
As several paediatricians have told me, "children are not just little adults", their physiology can be markedly different in some cases.
Sure - there's more to kill off over there.
Their point though was, a high concentration of fluoride stains children's teeth. Australia has a lower concentration because it's already in our water too. Grey imports bypass that standard.
Actually, after reading about fluoride I may stop using toothpaste that contains it entirely. And possibly find another source of drinking water too. The country that originally introduced it into their water supply (that western countries once held up as the shining example we should follow) have banned its use. And that hopeless female politician up in QLD held a public vote a while ago - if they should pump it into the water supply… The vote was an overwhelming NO - then she said well, bad luck, we're going to do it anyway. The stuff is a toxic by-product of manufacturing - and companies get to offload it by filtering it through our kidneys. Like they say - follow the money.
Actually, after reading about fluoride I may stop using toothpaste that contains it entirely.
fine if you want your teeth to look like that of a meth addict
Please link what you read about fluoride, it'd be interesting to read.
I'll provide a couple of links here too if anyone is interested:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21248357
"The findings of the reviews confirm the benefits of using fluoride toothpaste, when compared with placebo, in preventing caries in children and adolescents … weak, unreliable evidence … in children under 12 months of age may be associated with an increased risk of fluorosis [discolouration]."
This article is pretty good and collates several cochrane reviews:
http://archives.who.int/eml/expcom/expcom14/sodium_fluoride/…
"The evidence on the beneficial effects of topical fluorides is consistent and strong… firmly established …"
The public is generally uninformed about things such as fluoridation, which is why there are doctors and dentists around. If a politician asked whether the public wanted chlorine in their drinking water, what would they say?
They'd most likely disagree with things such as "forced medicating" or "chlorine is a toxic substance" and yet the practice occurs in most Australia cities otherwise we'd be drinking microbe-contaminated water instead.
I'm not sure which country you're referring to but it looks like it's Switzerland.
(In regards to these next couple of lines I'm just getting off Wikipedia (can't read Swiss) so I can't be 100% confident.)
Whilst it's true that Switzerland ceased water fluoridation in 2003, this was only because there were two fluoridation programs - one for water and one for bread. For whatever reason they couldn't regulate both programs at once and so eliminated the water fluoridation program in favour of the salt fluoridation program.
Contrast this to Australia which does NOT have a salt fluoridation program as far as I am aware.
Finally I'm not a dentist or anyone with conflicts of interest but a pharmacist; I just hate the amount of unverifiable BS that's on the net (hypocritical I realise considering I linked to wikipedia, but I had no other sources) - not that your comment is BS, so long as you can provide references =)
You're not supposed to swallow the toothpaste in the first place. You rinse it out, so how can it be dangerous to have fluoride in it??? o_0
My sister stopped using fluoride toothpaste and drinking tap water many years ago as it was used to poison the Jews in 1940's by the Germans. Not sure if its true or not but she keeps telling me off till this day for drinking tap water and says the government / Elites is killing us slowly by putting it in our water. I think shes nuts but might have some truth to it lol.
Makes sense. Kill all your tax payers for errrrr what was the reason again? ;o)
LOL! Great reply! Love the "chemophobia" reference too. Never heard of that one and will be using that from now on to describe all my "chemicals are very bad" friends and family.
Chemicals are good! They keep me employed (biochemical industry) mwuahahahaaaaaa!
Anyhoo, this has gone off topic now :oP
Sorry, but your sister sounds like an insane conspiracy theorist. That has no basis in truth.
Sometimes Conspiracy Theorists expose the truth without even knowing it
Fluorine not fluoride was used as a poison. That's like saying you're not going to use table salt (sodium chloride) because chlorine is a poisonous gas.
I've lived in Thailand for 5 years, to be honest I haven't noticed any difference with Colgate to what I buy in Aus on our annual visit. Smells the same, tastes the same, leaves my enamel intact. Tried Darkie once, didn't like the texture so back to Colgate. I once bought the wrong kind when in a hurry, it was salted - yes SALTED. Ewwww I threw that one away.
Haha the people who use salted toothpaste probably think similar "WTF minty toothpaste!"
Not just salty, minty too. The salt just overtakes the taste of the mint, and probably scratches your teeth to death. They also have Cinnamon flavoured which is also apparently minty as well. I agree with one of the other posts about parallel imports - I've found loads of things on the shelves here that are the same - same bottle, same smell, same effect, just a different name and definitely not fakes. Prime example is Lynx, the only deodourant which seems to work on my husband is available here and in Vietnam under the name of "Axe", which I believe is what they call it in US. Some shampoo's and body washes are the same - identical bottle/smell just a different name. I don't believe the Colgate I buy is fake. Big difference between parallel imports and fakes.
The toothpaste (and other toiletries) you're buying from the cheap shop is probably not made by Colgate at all, simply a parallel import, made under license from Colgate - there are usually signs up in those shops stating that, and that the ingredients are not necessarily the same.
Aldi got Standard Toothpaste Made in Oz, the value pack made in Germany. Not as cheap as the one dollar shop but good value. The sensitive one is abut a third of Sensodyne and seems to work OK.
Supposedly Colgate and also things like Lynx deodorant, Morning Fresh, Tim Tams, etc from $2 shops are called parallel lines and are fake copies of the original and are made in asia. After finding that out I dont use them anymore. Whats a dollar or two when it comes to your health, cos your ingesting these after washing your dishes in them, eating the Tim Tams, absorbing the Lynx special blend, and ingesting/ruining your teeth with the Colgate and setting yourself up for a nice dentist bill in the process. Not worth it. Coles or Woolies I say, oh and IGA
What? You are calling them parallel imports but you say they are fake?
Do you even know the meaning of parallel imports? It doesn't sound like you do.
They are not fake. Anyone who thinks they are fake are really stupid and they probably like wasting their money on something that's essentially the same.
Going by your theory, everyone in Asia would have crooked teeth.
By fake I mean they seem from personal use to be a substandard imitation of the original. The Morning Fresh doesn't seem to be the equivalent standard of the oz version as the bubbles die down after not very long, you dont get the gloss on your dishes the same and you have to work twice as hard to get your dishes clean. The Tim Tams just taste terrible and are made from some kind of cheap compound chocolate. I haven't risked my teeth on the Colgate so I can't say much about that. I don't know I think fake's a good word for them, they're trying to be like the original, using the same name etc, but they're just not doing a good job of it
Last time I was in Indonesia I bought 4 tubes of Pepsodent whitening toothpaste for 40c each, still using it now - it's perfectly fine and doesn't taste like sand.
I did buy toothpaste made in Thailand and found a very slight difference. Initially got mouth ulcers for a few days but then i got used to it. Its probably the higher fluoride content and that's about it. Other than that what u pay is what u get.
IMO, certain tooth powders (dentifrice) are much more effective then the toothpaste.
try this
http://www.dabur.com/Products-Health%20Care-Red%20Tooth%20Po…
http://www.amazon.com/Monkey-Brand-Toothpowder-200g-powder/d…
Visit any Indian Grocery shop and you will get in <2 bucks
I come from South East Asia country and my high school Chemistry teacher told me that the Fluoride in our toothpaste is too high. She said we only need a small amount of Fluoride each day. I believe what her say tho but I can't really feel the significant impact of it until now.
Could be fake. Beware when it is too cheap.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-other-illegal-white-powder-201…
I know its not Colgate toothpaste so getting off track a bit, but this Today Tonight fake cosmetics from asia videos pretty interesting.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/consumer/article/-/14…
And I know for a fact that Payot cosmetics was suing StrawberryNet one of the biggest online cosmetic companies for selling fake copies of their products. And so many people use StrawberryNet which is a worry.
I am sure that there is still the real (Australian made) Colgate toothpaste in some places in Australia.
Last March when we were in Torquay, Victoria we saw a local chemist with a special for Colgate toothpaste and when I checked the 'country of origin' it was Australia. We bought a number of tubes there.
In July when in Coffs Harbour, we were surprised that in Coles they also had the real tooth-paste.
In the past we have seen Colgate tooth-paste imported from South Africa, Viet Nam and mainly Thailand. We won't buy any of this foreign made tooth-paste even though the look alike boxes are made in Australia.
Next time we see some of the 'real thing' we will buy a quantity of them.
Yes, the $1 Asian Colgates tastes like they put sand in it. Really nasty and I won't be buying them again