A Victorian pill business and a striped paste.

Aquafresh is a brand built on something a customer sees only for a second each morning: the ribbon of paste on a toothbrush. According to the corporate history published by its current owner, Haleon, the toothpaste was launched by Beecham in 1973. English Wikipedia records that the name was originally spelt “Aqua-Fresh”, with a hyphen, and that the brand has been on sale continuously since that year.

Beecham was by then an old name in British household medicine. Haleon’s timeline traces the business to 1848, when Thomas Beecham launched his Beecham’s Pills business in the north of England, and lists among its later purchases the antacid brand Eno in 1938. The same timeline shows that toothpaste was not new to the group’s family tree either: it dates the launch of Macleans toothpaste to 1919. Aquafresh arrived more than half a century later as a second toothpaste with a very different idea at its centre.

That idea was the stripe. Haleon says the paste quickly became known for its stripes, and explains what they were meant to stand for: of the first two, one was for fighting tooth decay and the other for fresh breath. The brand’s British website describes the same arrangement, saying that at first there were just blue and white stripes, one standing for the fight against tooth decay and the other for fresher breath. Wikipedia likewise notes that the stripes were initially blue and white only.

The launch campaign leaned on the name. The brand’s American website says a new style of advertising was designed for the launch, the “Ocean of Freshness” commercial, which used images of blue seas and cresting waves to put across the product’s freshness and taste. Water, colour and the word “fresh” were therefore tied together from the first year: the name, the blue stripe and the advertising all pointed the same way.

Beecham, SmithKline Beecham, GSK, Haleon.

The third stripe came later. Haleon’s history dates the addition of a red stripe to 1981, describing it as a stripe “to promote healthy gums.” The brand’s American website places the change in the early 1980s, alongside new flavours and pump packaging, and its British site says the red stripe was added when gum care joined what it calls the brand’s “triple protection promise.” From that point the paste, and the identity built around it, settled into the red, white and blue that Wikipedia describes as the brand’s pattern today.

Ownership then passed through a run of mergers. Haleon’s timeline records that in 1989 SmithKline Beckman and the Beecham Group merged to form SmithKline Beecham plc, and that in 2000 SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo Wellcome merged to form GlaxoSmithKline plc. Wikipedia lists SmithKline Beecham and GSK among the brand’s previous owners. The brand’s own websites tell the lineage slightly differently: the British site credits the 1973 development to Smith Kline & French Laboratories, “who later became SmithKline Beecham and then GlaxoSmithKline,” while the American site names SmithKline Beecham. Haleon’s corporate history and Wikipedia both name Beecham.

Under GSK the brand sat beside other oral-care names that the group gathered over the following years. Haleon’s timeline records that GSK acquired Block Drug, including Sensodyne, in 2001, and that Biotène was acquired in 2008. The range itself widened beyond paste: the same timeline dates the Aquafresh flex neck brush to 1998, and Wikipedia describes the brand today as covering toothpaste and toothbrushes.

The consumer health business was then separated from the pharmaceutical group. Haleon’s history records that in July 2022 Haleon was listed as an independent company on the London and New York stock exchanges, and Wikipedia names Haleon as Aquafresh’s producer, with Beecham, SmithKline Beecham and GSK as earlier owners. Haleon has owned the brand since that 2022 listing, and its registered office is in Weybridge, Surrey.

Design and documentation.

Toothpaste and mouthwash brands are seen up close, every day, and usually for only a few seconds at a time. A tube sits on a basin, a bottle sits beside it, and a box is glimpsed on a crowded pharmacy shelf. Their identities tend to be carried by a few repeatable signals: the colour of the tube or carton, the shape and weight of the name, and in some cases the look of the product itself.

Colour does much of the work. Many oral-care names are tied to one strong pack colour, and a shopper often reaches for that colour before reading a word. Toothpaste adds a second surface that most packaged goods lack, the paste or gel squeezed onto a brush, which some brands have made part of their look with stripes or tinted gels. Mouthwash goes further still, because the liquid is visible through a clear bottle and its colour becomes part of the pack.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the brand, who owns it now and how its look has been described over time, and separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

Three stripes, an ocean and a cartoon captain.

Aquafresh’s central visual idea sits inside the product. Its three coloured bands are the paste itself, and the brand has spent decades turning them into a mark that works on a carton, in a commercial and on a child’s toothbrush. The brand’s American website now gives the stripes a pet name, calling them “nurdles,” and describes them as a reminder of the three benefits it promises.

The children’s side of the brand carries the idea furthest. The British website introduces Captain Aquafresh, a cartoon character who appears with “nurdles” named Lily, Billy and Milky, and the American site gives him a section of his own. Wikipedia records that in 2013 the brand launched a Better Brushing Programme aimed at encouraging oral-care habits from an early age, and that it came with new packaging designs and toothpaste formulations sorted by age, citing the dental-team magazine Vital in September 2013.

The adult range has kept adding names under the same stripes. Wikipedia notes that in May 2025 Aquafresh launched a range called White Renew, citing a report by the trade site KamCity that month. Across these launches the constants are the ones set in 1973 and 1981: a watery blue taken from the name and the “Ocean of Freshness” advertising, white for the paste, and a red stripe that turned a two-colour ribbon into a tricolour one.

For a design guide, Aquafresh shows how a product feature can become the identity, with the stripes doing the work that a symbol does for other brands and the colours chosen to stand for promises. Compare it with Sensodyne, its stablemate at Haleon, and Crest, the Procter & Gamble toothpaste brand. For this guide we use stripe red and stripe blue on paste white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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