These things are a bit like 'a minty hell in my mouth, and everyone's invited...' but they are also the only product available to properly fill the market niche of being portable and making your breath smell better quickly.
The competition are as follows:
- Breath mints - tend to make your mouth feel sweet and sticky, and wear off very quickly.
- Breath sprays - hurt when accidentally inhaled (so do breath mints come to think of it, but let's not go there.) and tend to make your mouth smell worse than before you used them.
- Chewing gum - unsightly and noisy, takes time, and you have to work out how to dispose of it in a 'non disgusting' way.
These little starchy strips are a little intense for some people, but they're far easier on the palate than actual Listerine, and far more practical to carry around with you.
Recommended.
On a slightly different note, a neat trick to show people is to lay one of these little strips flat on your palm. If you lay it one side down, the ends of the rectangle will curl up. If you flip it over, the sides will curl up. This is in response to your body's heat, so it'll work with most warm surfaces. They also do a 'funky dance' when exposed to a quick blast of hot air.
Try it!
Amaze your friends!
These devious wafer thin strips of mass oral destruction are available from petrol stations, supermarkets, corner stores, and pharmacies, and are definitely available in the USA, UK, Australia, and parts of mainland Europe.
The following facts have been presented to me:
- a scar faery advises me that when these were released in England they were met with indifference, because several months prior to this Wrigley's brought out a product called Thin Ice which was more or less identical. How subversive.
- Altoids are great on bad breath in a way no other mint is. Many people have told me this, and I'm sure they're right, although not from experience. No matter how right they are though, altoids still can't have the fantabulous convenience of these tiny minty bundles of devil-spawn action, nor do they have the sheer novelty value. What more can I say.
- Sasha Gabba Hey! says: 'Hmm. The last time I saw my younger sister, she had a packet of them, and offered my one. Despite my aversion to eating see-through plastic rectangles, I took it and put it on my tongue, It wasn't overpowering or anything, but it was very offputting the way it stopped becoming a solid. I would think it's effective as a way of punishing animals.'