Kolynos | Impressions

I am now 82 years old. My memory is failing. I can’t recall the names of people I knew when I was young, but I do remember the household items we used then.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, soap was the most common laundry detergent. My mother used Lever’s yellow Sunlight soap to wash our clothes. At that time, powdered soap was not manufactured, so my mother never had the chance to use it.

For bathing, we used Lux, Rexona, and Mysore Sandalwood soap, and we washed our hands with Lifebuoy soap.

Except for my father, everyone in the house used Colgate Dental Cream. My father preferred Forhan’s toothpaste. From 1950 to 1952, I was a boarder at St. Mary’s College in Chilaw, Sri Lanka. My father then bought me Kolynos toothpaste.

For brushing our teeth, everyone in the house used Colgate Dental Cream except my father. He preferred Forhan’s toothpaste. From 1950 to 1952, I was a boarder at St. Mary’s College in Chilaw, Sri Lanka. My father then bought me Kolynos toothpaste. toothpaste.

Colgate Toothpaste

A depiction of William Colgate (1783–1857) in his later years, drawn in 1881

William Colgate (January 25, 1783–March 25, 1857) was born in Hollingbourne, Kent, England. In 1804, Colgate went to New York City, where he worked as an apprentice in a soap boiler. He learned the trade by watching the methods practiced by his employer.

In 1806, Colgate established a starch, soap, and candle business in Manhattan, New York. He named it William Colgate & Company, which later became the Colgate-Palmolive Company.

Colgate’s oral hygiene products were first sold in 1873, sixteen years after the founder’s death.

Colgate Dental Cream with Gardol in 1950s

Colgate-Palmolive is a global leader in oral, personal, and home care products. It manufactures and sells toothpaste, mouthwash, dental floss, and toothbrushes.

According to Dun & Bradstreet, the annual revenue of the company as of December 31, 2022 (12-month period) was US$17.97 billion.

Forhan’s Toothpaste

Dr. Richard Joseph Forhan (1866–1965), a graduate of the Denver School of Dentistry, practiced in Cripple Creek, Colorado. In 1913, he moved to New York, where he began manufacturing dentifrice under his name. He developed Forhan’s toothpaste, foamless and not sweet, as a prescription to treat pyorrhea (also known as periodontitis), a polygenic disease that affects the oral gums and causes bleeding and tooth loss. It was the first mass-produced toothpaste to be sold in tubes.

In 1929, Zonite Products Corporation in New Brunswick, N.J., bought Forhan’s firm.

Forhan’s toothpaste later entered India when US multinational consumer goods company Colgate ruled the toothpaste market.

Marketed as a product “created by dentists,” Forhan’s established itself as the country’s first commercial fluoride toothpaste.

Kolynos Toothpaste

Kolynos is a line of oral care products created by Newell Sill Jenkins in 1908.

Jenkins developed and improved porcelain enamel, thus making a composition of porcelain paste into porcelain inlays, dental crowns, and bridges and the associated processing equipment.

In 1890, Willoughby D. Miller set up the pioneering and still valid theory that bacteria of the oral flora degrade carbohydrates into acids that damage the tooth enamel and thus allow access to bacteria to destroy the dentin by caries.

Together with Willoughby D. Miller, Jenkins developed the first toothpaste containing disinfectants. He named it Kolynos – a combination of two Greek words, Kolyo nosos (κωλύω νόσος), meaning “disease prevention”.

Numerous attempts to produce the toothpaste by pharmacists in Europe were uneconomic, and Jenkins returned to the US. After 17 years of development and clinical trials, Jenkins retired after transferring production and distribution to his son, Leonard A. Jenkins.

Within a few years, the company expanded in North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Far East. A branch operation opened in 1909 in London. By 1937, Kolynos had been produced in 22 countries and sold in 88 countries. Currently, Kolynos is widespread, mainly in South America and Hungary. Colgate-Palmolive took over the product of American Home Products in 1995 at a cost of one billion US dollars.[

In 1995, Colgate-Palmolive acquired Kolynos at a cost of one billion US dollars.

Kolynos products were popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

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