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A popular item about markings on toothpaste tubes is yet another Internet-circulated consumer tip that supposedly provides useful information about a common class of product by revealing data that is available only to those in the know who are cognizant of where to look for hidden indicators and how to interpret them: As is typical of such tips, the claim about what these indicators supposedly reveal is completely wrong. According to this bit of online lore, the colored squares or rectangular bars found on the crimp at the closed end of toothpaste tubes signify the composition of the product contained therein: whether its ingredients are natural or chemical, and whether the toothpaste includes medicine. (These terms are really too vague to be useful, as even natural products are made up of chemicals, and medicine is too non-specific a term to be informative.) However, those colored squares on the crimps of those tubes have nothing to do with the formulation of the toothpaste inside. They're an artifact of the manufacturing process known as eye marks or color marks, printed marks that can be read by light beam sensors and typically identify where product packaging is to be cut or folded as connected units stream through machinery at high speed: The colors of eye mark registers are not limited to the ones mentioned above (and may not necessarily be visible on the finished product), and the different colors simply signify different types of packaging or different types of sensors. The best way to ascertain the composition of a given brand of toothpaste is by reading the ingredients information printed on the toothpaste box and/or tube.
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