Doublemint Gum - Chew yourself beautiful.

Here's an odd one from the Pages of advertising past. Chewing gum makes you beautiful! In 1938, the laws regarding truth in advertising must have been different in that they exist now and basically didn’t then. Hooray for wildly fabricated lies!

The Wrigley company was free to claim that chewing gum could tone up your face in that it “stimulates sleepy face muscles”. The muscles used in chewing are basically your masseters and orbicularis oris, and the probably get plenty of exercise anyway what with all the eating you do every day. The masseter is the one on the sides that makes your jaw go up and down. The orbicularis oris is a ring-shaped muscle that’s inside your lips. Without this one, you’d drool all the time like you just came back from the dentist. Also, you’d find Everyone Loves Raymond to be an unpredictable and clever show. The orbicularis oris is… dun dun dunnnnn!... a sphincter muscle. “Eeeeew!” Calm down. That just means it’s a muscle with a hole in it. There’s also a sphincter muscle around each eye. Sphincters are muscles that pinch shut, instead of just pulling in one direction. There are loads of them throughout your body, and they mostly keep various juices from leaking from one place to another accidentally.

Anyway, Wrigley expected you to believe that not only did their gum tone up your face, but it also “brightened” your teeth. Keep in mind that this was in the era before any plausible non-sugar sweeteners existed. So, chewing sugar brightened your teeth. Also, it made you fly and scared off communism. Maybe Doublemint could be said to “brighten” your teeth if they were covered with food or fur from that dead squirrel you sampled on the way home from the boutique. But, chewing almost anything would force saliva around your mouth, performing the same squirrel fur eradication as Doublemint does.

Let’s not forget that Doublemint “relaxes tense lines” and keeps you “streamlined”. Wow. Streamlined. I guess people got around much faster back then before we built all these highways and filled them with parked cars. So much so that facial wind resistance was a widespread problem.