Hasta La Creative!

If you thought Enzyte’s promise to make your penis bigger was club-footed false advertising, wait until you see Mental Floss’s list of shameless false-advertising schemes. The biggest offender is Listerine, which claimed its product treated basically every ailment under the sun in 1921, and was still saying it was better than dental floss in 2005. (It also invented halitosis so it could then cure it, but that isn’t mentioned.) Really, the whole list could have been about Listerine. Aside from Amoco’s ridiculous claim that its gasoline is “crystal clear,” everything else on the list is either an old-time medical bamboozle (Lydia Pickham’s Vegetable Compound, Dr. Koch’s Cure All), homeopathic crap that never works (Airborne), or a non-sequitur (a trick wedding). We’re surprised they left out the “Animal Care Certified” bruhaha, actually.

—Posted by David Kiefaber