A 4 1/2" tall rectangular-shaped rich TRANSLUCENT PURPLE colored antique TOOTH WASH - LIQUID TOOTH PASTE bottle.   This bottle also has a BLATANT spelling or grammar error in it, the letter "S" in WASH ... is clearly backwards, as very obviously seen in the last picture, above.  This is a very old DENTAL bottle and, like all of these antique DENTAL HYGIENE bottles, they were for the MOUTH TEETH GUMS BREATH THROAT TOOTH and anything remotely related to dental hygiene!   This is an ORIGINAL ANTIQUE hand Blown Into Mold bottle (BIM) with a tooled top, dating back well over ONE CENTURY OLD, a good 100 years old + PLUS.

It is hard to say if this was an original old product of the California Perfume Co. (CPC = AVON), if it was from California, or if the recipe was something that originated in old California. The CALIFORNIA PERFUME Company eventually evolved into the company that we all have heard about today, Avon. Originally they put out a plethora of different products, for health and hygiene, whereas now they are more known just for perfume and cologne. Or it could be that it was put out by a cosmetic company IN California, thus the California Perfume Co. Yet just like there are different California wines today that are actually put up by companies back east, but made with products (grapes) grown in California, they are referred to as "California” wines. One of these is the way that this product was. BUT all things set aside, what is MOST significant about this bottle and set's it aside as a GREAT bottle is that the letter "S" in Tooth WASH, the “S” is clearly backwards, a total grammatical error by the early day mold maker.   Then there is the pristine purple color of this bottle ... this purple color is the result of having manganese in the glass.  Manganese is a mineral, a rock, that was mined, crushed, and pulverized into a powder, then added to vats of molten liquid glass, and acted as a decolorizing agent to turn the natural aqua-tinted glass into a pure crystal clear colorless glass.   But when exposed to the ultraviolet rays of the sun or other sources of UV rays, it triggers a chemical reaction and the manganese oxidizes and turns a wonderful amethyst color.  Though some may suggest that this lavender color has been artificially produced or altered if it was purpled by any other source than natural sunlight, the only thing that may be altered is the time it took to turn purple.   We had a friend of ours accelerate the sun color purple process by running this bottle through an industrial food sterilizer which has the same affect as the sun, but a lot faster.   It doesn't really matter whether a bottle has turned purple by the sun or UV rays in a controlled environment, they all turn the same purple color as it is all the same chemical reaction taking place.  But that most important factor to make this even possible, is the age of the bottle as, with few exceptions, only clear glass from before 1914 has manganese in it and will turn sun-colored-amethyst.   So a bottle has to be old enough, blown with manganese in the glass, in order to turn purple.  Not only does this deep purple/amethyst color make this a great looking antique bottle, but it also authenticates it as being truly antique.   Many collectors of antique dental bottles are dentists themselves, building small collections of quality antique dental bottles to display in their waiting rooms and offices.  This is a nice example of just this sort of thing.   Though most of these old 'dentifrice' bottles contained nothing more than a liquid antiseptic tooth rinse, they claimed that they had medicinal properties that, if used regularly, could cure any type of past or present disease of the mouth, gums, teeth, throat, things that they still can't cure today.   Kind of hard to swallow when the maker of this tooth wash had a hard time figuring out how to properly write down simple letters of the English alphabet, check it out!

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2165-67x, 6117-20x

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