It's less intense

I have used Listerine every time I brush my teeth for a while now. However, when my last bottle was used up, I opted to give a competitor a try, because I was given, Charlie's golden ticket style, a coupon for Crest's mouthwash for $3 off, making it cost something like $1.50. Compared to the outrageous $5 that Listerine costs, I'd buy it even if the only available flavor was mayonnaise.

It's some blue color, like some sort of goo you'd expect to see in a Ghostbusters movie. Or that fictitious blue raspberry flavor. Show me an actual blue raspberry and I'll take this color/flavor combination seriously. (Wikipedia has one, but I don't trust it. I couldn't find a second picture in my three minutes of Google searching.) But I swished it around in my mouth, and did the requisite gargle before making my sink turn vaguely blue. It does not make your mouth feel like the inner layer of cells is being burned off your face. And you know, as awful as that is in Listerine (one time while gargling a bubble landed in my eye), it makes me feel like it's working. I can't say for sure that it is, because while my knowledge of elementary chemistry is relatively solid, translating that into biology is very hard for me. Unless it's talking about chemicals that will kill you. But alcohol -> oxidation -> burning -> dead bacteria makes sense to me.

So, I have a medium bottle of Crest mouthwash, that I can't be sure if it's actually accomplishing anything. I could be swishing with orange juice and get the same dental effect, as far as I can tell. Except it wouldn't be blue.