i'm trying to not only post (about) the (overt) horrors so please enjoy a #flosstodon that's ready for its closeup
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@inquiline wait. Does this one have. . . glitter? Nothing like microplastics inside the macroplastic implement one has just put in their mouth.
it does indeed have glitter! i'm not sure, but i think i've seen other glitter ones before, maybe? but not pearlized!!
@inquiline philosophical question: why are so many flossers shades of green?
my kneejerk prosaic/lazy answer is i think this one is perhaps supposed to resemble mouthwash?
but then we have to ask about why mouthwash is green, and other things i definitely don't know the answer to (might know where to look/who to ask)
@inquiline @SRLevine some thoughts: literal greenwashing? An appeal to the bathroom-clean-minimalist aesthetic of transparent glass tile on white? Invoking water? The weirdness of a black-on-matte-black Toronto #flosstodon is still with me. Is the os a grave? Or is it #flosstodon you mourn for?
mint is a good point @SRLevine . i was more thinking about the history of marketing hygiene. to me these colors look like they from, idk, early color print culture, advertising, and dupont and dow, but this is a vibes answer
@mirijb2 your horrifying invocation of the #flosstodon ost made me think of how (supposedly) black plastic is more likely to be made from e-waste. what if these flossers were motherboards?? we need someone who knows how to trace the supply chain! (hint: it's very very hard)
@inquiline @SRLevine I trace nineteenth-century supply chains for a living 😊 Those folk left clues lying around everywhere; today’s capitalists and extractors are much sneakier. E-waste: a grave indeed. Also: yuck.
petroleum molecules are apparently particularly hard to trace, i suppose this makes them perfect for (making) (up) the (modern) supply chain (a descriptor which i'd have included save for character limits)
am currently imagining a public exhibition tracing petromodernity through the sneaky flosser, who's in??
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we need to find a history of dentistry (which i've just typo'ed as "fentistry," twice--not sure what that is) society to underwrite it
@inquiline I always assumed mouthwash was green to evoke mint (but I'm not a mouthwash user, so this is very much an assumption)
@SRLevine @inquiline throwing into the mix that i've also seen both flossers and mouthwash in shades of blue 🤔
@shinealittlelove @SRLevine @inquiline Spearmint flavor is coded green, peppermint flavor is coded blue - I suspect this derives from chewing gum.
(Like sodas: generic cola is coded red because Coke dominated Pepsi for a long time, ginger ale is coded green and gold, lemon-lime is coded mostly green with yellow and/or white, cherry cola/dr pepper are coded dark red... and caffeine free is coded gold and sugar-free is coded white or black. I did my PhD on using histogram-based color recognition to identify sodas.)
@shinealittlelove @SRLevine @inquiline mint is sometimes blue-coded too, though. I think I most often see it as a differentiator between peppermint being blue and spearmint or wintergreen being, well, green.
Or it could be an artifact of how people see blue and green differently and not really questioning others' choices enough to realize that ^^; kind of like the blue-green test that was around for a while, but sadly doesn't seem to be online anymore ):
@shinealittlelove @SRLevine @inquiline here is the mothership: a Safeway shelf. (Why are gum-stimulating brushes traffic yellow?)
