Meet the new toothpaste, not the same as the old toothpaste

Brian and I have a few very specific requirements for toothpaste. I insist on a brand that's cruelty-free (not tested on animals). Brian needs one that's free of sodium lauryl sulfate, which seems to give him canker sores. And we both want a toothpaste with fluoride, which, until recently, was the only chemical available that could actually prevent tooth decay. (Nowadays, there's an alternative called hydroxyapatite, which appears to be equally effective. But it's also more expensive, so most fluoride-free toothpastes don't contain it.)

None of the leading toothpaste brands (Crest, Colgate, Tom's of Maine, Sensodyne) meets all these requirements. So, for the past several years, we've relied on Trader Joe's toothpaste. Not only did it tick all the boxes, it was also much cheaper than the major brands at $3.50 for a 6-ounce tube. But last summer, we learned that Trader Joe's had discontinued its store brand on account of problems with its supplier. Our man on the inside (a friend who works there) told us the store was working with a new supplier and expected to get its product on the shelves by the end of November, but our one remaining tube wasn't going to last us that long.

So, after squeezing every drop out of that tube and exhausting all the sample tubes we'd received from our dentist, we went looking for a new toothpaste that met our stringent requirements. After a bit of online research, I determined that the best alternative was a brand called hello (without an initial capital letter). We picked up a tube of that for $5 at Target and, on the whole, liked it very much. The flavor was pleasantly minty, and being greeted by the cheerful "hello" on the tube made a pleasant start to the day. 

There were only two things we didn't like about it. The first was the price: $1.06 per ounce, nearly twice as much as our old Trader Joe's toothpaste. The other was the tube it came in. Our old toothpaste came in the traditional squeezable tube we'd both grown up with, which we could flatten and roll as we worked our way down the tube to squeeze out the paste more effectively. This new tube was made of a springier plastic and would reinflate itself after being squeezed, making it more or less impossible to squish every last bit of the paste out of the tube.

So, as November drew to an end, we kept an anxious eye on the toiletries shelf at Trader Joe's, hoping the new store-brand toothpaste would show up before our first tube of hello ran out. But November ran into December with no sign of one, and it got harder and harder to squeeze anything out of the hello tube. Finally, we gave in and bought a second tube—which, of course, was the cue for the new Trader Joe's product to show up at last. In fact, not one but two new toothpastes appeared: a "sensitivity" toothpaste with fluoride and a fluoride-free whitening toothpaste with hydroxyapatite. Both were the same price, $4 for 6 ounces—more than the old store brand, but considerably less than hello. Although we already had a full tube in reserve, we decided to spring for a tube of the new TJ's toothpaste anyway and open it first. That way, if we didn't like it, we'd have the other tube to fall back on. We hesitated over which of the new toothpastes to try but eventually settled on the one with fluoride, since it was more familiar.

After one brushing with the new toothpaste, we realized this might have been the wrong choice. It had a sort of weird taste that we could only guess was due to the desensitizing ingredient, potassium nitrate. (We'd tried sample tubes of Sensodyne before, and it also had a hint of that odd flavor, but with stronger mint and sweetener flavors to cover it up.) So now we face a bit of an ecofrugal dilemma. Do we (1) try to use up this whole tube of weird-tasting toothpaste, (2) go back to the pricier hello toothpaste that we know we like, or (3) try the other Trader Joe's toothpaste, which may or may not have the same peculiar taste?

No matter which we choose, there's one downside we'll definitely have to live with: those pesky, self-inflating tubes. The new Trader Joe's toothpaste comes in the same kind of stand-up plastic tube as the hello toothpaste. If we go for option 1, we probably won't be all that bothered about being unable to use up all the toothpaste from this tube, since we don't really like it anyway. But with option 2 or 3, we may have to resort to buying (or making) one of those special tube-squeezing tools or even cutting open the tube to scoop out the last few drips.

What we'd like best, of course, is to have our old toothpaste back, in the same old tube. But since that's not an option, we'll have to figure out which choice is next best. C'est la vie ecofrugale.