Episode 19: Always a Bridesmaid

"Always a bridesmaid, never a bride" sounds like an old proverb. It actually traces back to a 1925 Listerine ad built around a fictional woman named Edna and an obscure medical word the company turned into a national anxiety: halitosis. In this episode of Lies We Bought, I trace the phrase from a 1917 British music hall comedy song to the magazine campaign that took Listerine from a struggling floor cleaner to the third largest print advertiser in America.

We get into the strange early life of Listerine (surgical antiseptic, floor cleaner, and at one point a claimed gonorrhea cure), how Gerard Lambert pulled the word halitosis out of a medical textbook and built a disease around it, the three-part fear formula behind the Edna ads, the roughly 7,000 percent sales explosion that followed, and what research from Leon Festinger and Kim Witte reveals about why fear-based advertising still works on us a hundred years later.

There's also a sleepover, a wordless piece of gum, and the blue tongue era of breath strips.