Gibbs Dentrifice - plastic bubbles in your mouth

Apparently, "dentrifice" is a liquid or powder used for oral hygeine. I believe that, even when this ad was printed in a 1948 issue of Picture Post magazine, toothpaste was the standard mouth cleaner. So, even when this ad was new, dentrifice was already an anachronism.

Yeah, fascinating. But look at the great photo. Tins of Gobbs Dentrifice floating in acrylic bubbles in front of a nebulous background of irrelevant origin. Remember, there was no photoshop at the time, so what you see is what they built. It's more than possible that the acrylic orbs are just hemispheres, of course. I keep trying to look at the reflections to see if they imply a complete sphere or not. Not that it would matter, but my hat would be slightly more off to them if they went that extra mile and actually put the product inside a plastic sphere. They could be half-shells closed at a seam that's perfectly perpendicular to the camera, if you get what I mean. That would hide the seam between the two halves.

Then there's the matter of how they suspended them. There could be strings. The vague background would make that easy enough to airbrush out, wouldn't it? Let's not forget that they could easily avoid the problem of hanging everything if it were laid down on a table. Bubbles could be lying on a clear sheet of acrylic a few feet abive the background, whatever it is. The orbs wouldn't roll around if there was a flat spot on the back of them, perhaps behind the can of product?

 Point is, in the age of analog, nothing was as easy as it is today, which makes great results even more impressive.