Do colored boxes on toothpaste tube indicate its ingredients? Fact Check

Messages online claim that a person can determine the ingredients in toothpaste by looking for a coloured box at the end of its tube.

FALSE

Such messages purport that the coloured box found at the bottom of a toothpaste tube can tell the user if that particular toothpaste product contains “chemicals” or “natural” ingredients (an ambiguous and misleading differentiation at best, since everything is ultimately compromised of chemicals.)

Examples of such messages are below.

Toothpaste. …
At the bottom they have a color. What is it?
GREEN: they are from pure herbal ingredients.
BLUE: from pure. herbal plus pharmaceutical materials.
RED: Pharmaceutical ingredients.
BLACK: Chemical ingredients.
NO COLOR: Don’t buy it, leave it on the shelf.

Green: natural;
Blue : Natural + Medicine;
Red : Natural + Chemical composition;
Black : pure chemical.

The messages are nonsense, and have been spreading across the Internet for a number of years now. Even if the messages had some substance and the boxes really did indicate the ingredients contained within, the messages would still be wholly useless since they use vague and confused descriptions such as “chemical”, “pharmaceutical” and “natural”. Both pharmaceutical and natural substances would still be compromised of chemicals.

The real meaning behind the coloured boxes is fairly mundane. While the colour of the box will have very little meaning to the customer, it will certainly be useful to the machines that create a product’s packaging. The boxes are frequently called “eye marks”, and exist on all sorts of packaging, not just toothpaste.

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Here is a description from the Consolidated Label Co. –

An ‘eye mark’ (also known as ‘eye spot’) is a small rectangular printed area located near the edge of the printed flexible packaging material. A sensor on the form-fill-seal (FFS) machine reads the eye mark to identify packaging material, control the material’s position, and coordinate the separation and cutting of the flexible packaging material.

This aged myth has also been debunked by a number of leading health websites too. Healthline writes –

Unsurprisingly, this tidbit of internet wisdom is totally false.
The colored rectangle actually has nothing to do with the toothpaste’s formulation. It’s simply a mark made during the manufacturing process. The marks are read by light beam sensors, which notify machines where the packaging should be cut, folded, or sealed.

Most countries require products such as toothpaste to list the ingredients contained within on the packaging itself, not using some type of cryptic colour scheme. As such, it’s the list of ingredients on the packaging this is – unsurprisingly – the best place to ascertain a product’s makeup.

As such, we rank the claim that the coloured boxes on toothpaste tubes indicates the ingredients of the toothpaste itself as false.