Crest Whitestrips
Crest Whitestrips Disrupts Tooth Whitening
“This is it. This is what we need”, Paul Sagel, a young chemical engineer at P&G utters in February
1997. He recalls later:” I put it on my teeth, stuck it on, and said. “That´s it!” We knew we had it instantly”.
What Sagel remembers with such excitement is the eureka moment when he together with his senior colleague and mentor Bob Dirksing comes up with a novel effective solution for tooth whitening. Bob
Dirksing, 56, is a 30-year company veteran and a fellow in P&G´s Victor Mills Society, an elite group of a few dozen P&G veterans who have received the membership in this honourable society as a reward for outstanding achievements in technology and innovation. Paul Sagel has joined P&G in 1993 after graduating with summa cum laude in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.
Initially he focuses on chewing gum technology, chemical technology for dentifrice, packaging and clinical imaging methods. Then, in 1996, as P&G gets more and more interested in tooth whitening and starts building a team for this opportunity, Gordon Brunner, the chief technology officer of P&G, decides that on the R&D side he wants to enlist Dirksing and Sagel. So the two begin working together on tooth whitening. Dirksing who teaches creativity classes for P&G all around the world is very happy with the new set-up: “The worst you can do during the initial part of a project is put a whole bunch of people on it”, he explains. “It´s best to take two people and turn them loose: an older person for wisdom and counsel and a younger one for energy and inspiration”.
The two men conduct clinical trials and convince themselves that tooth color can indeed be changed with bleaching chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide or carbamide peroxide if the teeth are exposed to the chemical long enough. P&G is very familiar with bleaches from e.g. their laundry business where whitening ingredients or bleaches have been used for decades in
“This is it. This is what we need”, Paul Sagel, a young chemical engineer at P&G utters in February
1997. He recalls later:” I put it on my teeth, stuck it on, and said. “That´s it!” We knew we had it instantly”.
What Sagel remembers with such excitement is the eureka moment when he together with his senior colleague and mentor Bob Dirksing comes up with a novel effective solution for tooth whitening. Bob
Dirksing, 56, is a 30-year company veteran and a fellow in P&G´s Victor Mills Society, an elite group of a few dozen P&G veterans who have received the membership in this honourable society as a reward for outstanding achievements in technology and innovation. Paul Sagel has joined P&G in 1993 after graduating with summa cum laude in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.
Initially he focuses on chewing gum technology, chemical technology for dentifrice, packaging and clinical imaging methods. Then, in 1996, as P&G gets more and more interested in tooth whitening and starts building a team for this opportunity, Gordon Brunner, the chief technology officer of P&G, decides that on the R&D side he wants to enlist Dirksing and Sagel. So the two begin working together on tooth whitening. Dirksing who teaches creativity classes for P&G all around the world is very happy with the new set-up: “The worst you can do during the initial part of a project is put a whole bunch of people on it”, he explains. “It´s best to take two people and turn them loose: an older person for wisdom and counsel and a younger one for energy and inspiration”.
The two men conduct clinical trials and convince themselves that tooth color can indeed be changed with bleaching chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide or carbamide peroxide if the teeth are exposed to the chemical long enough. P&G is very familiar with bleaches from e.g. their laundry business where whitening ingredients or bleaches have been used for decades in