Joseph Lister and the myth of 'chronic halitosis'

If you want to kill bad breath causing germs, you use Listerine. It's been around forever and it's in practically every medicine cabinet. If something says that it's 99.9% effective, and that 9 out of 10 doctors use it and recommend it, then it just has to be the best. Well, not so much. This wintry-green, tonsil burning potion that we gargle every morning was actually used (in an extremely distilled form) as floor cleaner and a gonorrhea remedy. But it wasn't a terribly revenue-generating product until the 1920's, when according to Steve Levitt's and Stephen J. Dubner's pop culture and economics book "Freakonomics,"

it was pitched as a solution to 'chronic halitosis,' the faux medical term that the Listerine advertising group created in 1921 to describe bad breath. By creating a 'medical condition' for which consumers now felt they needed a cure, Listerine created the market for their mouthwash. Until that time, bad breath was not conventionally considered catastrophe, but Listerine's ad campaign changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. Twitchell writes, 'Listerine did not make mouthwash as much as it made halitosis.' Listerine's new ads featured forlorn young women and men, eager for marriage but turned off by their mate's rotten breath. 'Can I be happy with him in spite of that?' one maiden asked herself. In just seven years, the company's revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million.

It's weird to think about not caring about how one's breath smells. We have after coffee mints, after dinner mints, mint spray, mint strips, mint gum and so forth. There's a multibillion dollar industry solely based on the premise that society's breath should smell like a type of herb. And why mint? What is so great about mint? It's actually a pretty intense flavor and scent. It's fascinating that the terms 'mint' and 'fresh' have become synonymous, and that over the last hundred years we have not only grown accustomed to the smell of "fresh" a.k.a. "minty" breath, but also expect it, and if one doesn't have it, not only is their breath foul but we usually consider that person to be foul, unkempt, and dirty. How many times have you seen a cheesy guy in a sitcom do a "spritz, spritz" of breath spray before walking up to a hot girl?
Similar to soap, we don't actually need Listerine, medically. It doesn't kill germs that create halitosis, because there is no such thing as halitosis. Halitosis is human breath, repackaged as something that could ruin a marriage according to Listerine's first ads. In the case of Listerine's ad campaign which drove sales through the roof, the advertisers relied on the use of fear to sell their product. One of our supposed biggest fears is to end up as old maids or spinsters destined to die alone. However, if our breath is fresh that's one less reason for our mates to leave us, and we can live happily ever after.