I love that the proliferation of choice powered by the internet has given rise to so many different types of everything. Take toothpaste, for example. When I was growing up in the ’90s, you had Crest, Colgate, Sensodyne for the sensitive types, and if you were a crunchy, granola type, Tom’s of Maine. That was about all a person would reliably see on the retail store shelves.

Now we’ve got choices like Euthymol Purple Whitening Toothpaste, which is brand owner Olive Young’s most popular product in Korea. K-beauty trends have been hot in the West for the past few years, and this purple toothpaste is all over social media these days.

Being purple isn’t an aesthetic choice to make it “fun” or stand out from a crowded marketplace of trendy toothpastes, though. It’s claimed by Euthymol that the purple coloring actually cancels out teeth yellowing through some fancy color wheel calculations.

the purple neutralizes yellow stains

You remember the color wheel from arts class in school, right? That right there is how you’ll make your smile whiter. The color wheel is a circle, on which all the hues and colors of the rainbow are arranged according to how they relate to one another. Colors such as red and orange are next to each other because they occupy similar light wavelengths. Blue, being as different as can be from orange, is directly opposite of orange on the wheel. This pairing of perfect opposites across the color wheel makes them complementary colors, and if you combine complementary colors in the right amounts you get gleaming white.

The opposite of stained-teeth yellow on the color wheel is purple. That’s the pitch behind Olive Young’s Euthymol Purple Whitening Toothpaste. Purple, being a complementary color of yellow, means that in theory, adding purple toothpaste to yellowed teeth should whiten your smile better than a purely white toothpaste.

Euthymol stands for a combination of eucalyptus and thymol, two of the main ingredients in the original, not-purple Euthymol toothpaste formula created in the UK in 1898. Thymol is one of the ingredients that gives the thyme spice its herbal flavor and aroma. Euthymol Purple Whitening Toothpaste has a mint flavor, though, so it won’t taste radically different from the toothpastes you’re used to, and it’ll keep your breath fresh for up to 12 hours, according to Olive Young.

Available on Amazon for $15, you can have it in your hands (and in your mouth) via Amazon Prime faster than you can say Euthymol.