Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

If you’ve ever watched a commercial for paper towels, toilet paper, diapers, or tampons, you’ve seen it. The blue liquid. It’s the same shade of blue as the azure waters off the Australian coast, and its presence is always reassuring. You watch it seep through the pores of the product in question with a slow, almost deliberate rhythm. The motion of the demonstration, the time-lapse progression from wet to damp to moist to dry, is critical to the product. Either it’s a slow, radial pour, or a suggestive drip. The blue liquid is oddly soothing and satisfying, but always less so for the competing product. The competition always fails to absorb, and absorption, as we all know, is critical.

The blue liquid is not just some convenient device. It’s not some accident of dye and fluids. The blue liquid was designed, my friends. Granted, like many great inventions, it was originally designed with a different purpose in mind. So I suppose that does make it a convenient accident of sorts. Its tale is a humble one.

It all started in a poorly funded chemical weapons laboratory. The lab lacked deadly viruses, bacteria, or even a can of Comet to work with, but still had lots of shiny spoons and tubes, and since they were under the onus of a special grant, the scientists (who had just bought new white coats) couldn’t let all that material go to waste.

The exact formula for the blue liquid remains one of the most closely guarded secrets on Earth. Vatican Library level stuff, only with slightly fewer crosses. Few people know the complete formula, least of all me. So this paragraph doesn’t really serve much of a point. The most common theory is that something blue was added to something wet. Sure, this makes sense on the surface, but some people are never satisfied. There are alternatives, the most popular of which is the Green School. The Green School contends that a liquid so perfectly blue couldn’t simply have had blue added to it, because no matter how much blue you add, you’ll never get to “true” blue. The Green School says that the blue liquid started out green, and then yellow was subtracted from it, leaving the pure color. Critics point out that this is more or less chemically impossible. Even if this were the case, there should be a perfectly yellow liquid showing up somewhere in our modern advertising, yet we see none. Supporters of the Green School counter this by saying that no one wants to stare at yellow liquid all day, for obvious reasons. After this point, the argument devolves into pointless name-calling and extremely uninformed, psuedoscientific pontification. It’s where Rush Limbaugh steps in, occasionally.

So while the exact origin of the blue liquid remains a mystery, we do know its original purpose. Someone eventually decided to taste it. Don’t ask me why. You’re bored in the lab one day, there’s nothing interesting on Youtube, you start tasting things. You know how it is. Anyway, they realized that the blue liquid tastes exactly like freshly picked cherries. Like from an orchard. Or a bog. Or wherever the hell you grow cherries. The point is, cherries.

Naturally, the scientists took their creation to the biggest snack companies in the world. The flavor was a hit. Executives hailed it as “the most realistic cherry simulation we’ve ever tasted,” (source redacted). However, problems cropped up in user testing. This cherry flavoring agent, perfect as it was, was still blue. So you had all these cakes, tarts, and gummy roll-ups that were a completely wrong color, or purple, at best. The food industry shorthand for “cherry” is a dark red. Everyone knows that. Everyone. The blue liquid, though, contradicted peoples’ expectations, especially those of the most sought-after demographic, children. It routinely made them cry. The judicious application of puppies alleviated the problem, but the marketers weren’t willing to bank on everyone having a puppy. Either your puppy grows into a dog (fine for a poodle but not a bull mastiff), or you’re dealing with a cat household. We all know that cats couldn’t care less whether a child lives or dies. It should come as no surprise that the puppy solution was deemed impractical.

Needless to say, the blue liquid’s glory in the food market was never realized. One day, angry at being so close to riches and yet so far, cursing the uneducated masses for putting so much stock in color and puppies, one of the scientists knocked over a large tube of the delicious blue liquid. It seeped into a nearby roll of cheap paper towels.

The scientist was mesmerized.

The towels were cheap and flimsy, but the effect was absolutely breathtaking. He was unable to tear himself away from the roll of towels for the next six hours. The scientist, who was murdered by his wife years later, famously remarked, “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Even more beautiful than my wife,” (source redacted from court testimony).

The rest, as they say, is history. Television does not do the blue liquid justice, kind of like buying a poster of the Sistine Chapel. Nevertheless, the blue liquid has captivated commercial audiences for the better part of twenty years. Now you know the story of its origins.

Thanks to GDeeeezl for the suggestion.