• Toothpaste is an abrasive paste (an abrasive is something that will scratch or grind something)
• In the case of toothpaste it grinds away the leftover food and plaque on your teeth, with the help of your toothbrush.
• The abrasive in toothpaste is called Dicalcium phosphate dihydrate and it makes up about a 5th of a tube of toothpaste
• The other main part of toothpaste is the paste which is made up of water and things to help it spread through your mouth easily like a type of detergent which makes it foam and something to make your teeth shiny.

• The flavours of toothpaste are usually from plants like Spearmint and Peppermint most toothpastes are sweetened with artificial sweetener.
• Before toothpaste was invented people used all kinds of dry, rough things as an abrasive to clean their teeth – things like crushed eggshell, pumice the burnt hooves of animals!!!
• Before toothbrushes were invented people used twigs or their fingers to brush their teeth.
• A couple of hundred years ago when people didn’t know about brushing their teeth most people had black rotten teeth especially if they ate lots of sugar like Queen Elizabeth the first.

The ancient Egyptian recipe for toothpaste

The world's oldest-known formula for toothpaste, used more than 1,500 years before Colgate began marketing the first commercial brand in 1873, has been discovered on a piece of dusty papyrus in the basement of a Viennese museum.

In faded black ink made of soot and gum arabic mixed with water, an ancient Egyptian scribe has carefully described what he calls a "powder for white and perfect teeth".

When mixed with saliva in the mouth, it forms a "clean tooth paste".

According to the document, written in the fourth century AD, the ingredients needed for the perfect smile are one drachma of rock salt - a measure equal to one hundredth of an ounce - two drachmas of mint, one drachma of dried iris flower and 20 grains of pepper, all of them crushed and mixed together.

The result is a pungent paste which one Austrian dentist who tried it said made his gums bleed but was a "big improvement" on some toothpaste formulae used as recently as a century ago.

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