What happened to all the coloured toilet paper?
As toilet roll manufacturers we’re always on hand to tackle the burning topics when it comes to everyone’s favourite everyday essential. Today we’re getting out the paintbrushes and splashing some colour around.
What happened to all the coloured toilet rolls?
UK shoppers might have noticed that the toilet roll aisles are looking decidedly more plain than they did a few years ago. But why was some toilet paper coloured in the first place, can you still get coloured toilet paper, and what is the best colour for toilet paper anyway?
We’ll start with the most famous example of coloured toilet rolls, the pink rolls of France. Allons-y!
Why Is pink toilet paper popular in France?
“La vie en rose” literally means life in pink. In France they take their lyrics seriously because pink toilet rolls are a staple of supermarkets and private homes all over the country.
Readers from the UK might remember when our own choices of toilet paper were similarly colourful. In the 90s and 00s it was normal to see toilet paper in pastel shades of peach, green, blue and pink on supermarket shelves. The colours were selected to match popular colours used for tiles, towels, and bathroom suits.
But coloured rolls were on their way out in the UK by the late 2010s, and the decline kicked up a notch when the pandemic hit. With toilet roll shortages fuelled by panic-buying, toilet rolls were more basic necessity than style statement, and toilet paper manufacturers felt less pressure jazz up their products.
But some habits dye harder than others (sorry!) Pink rolls are still popular in France to this day. In fact, pink toilet paper is an important part of the story of Naked Sprout! Our founders Leila and Tom were on a holiday in France and noticed pink toilet rolls in two separate bed and breakfasts, hundreds of miles apart. The pink rolls made them laugh but it got them thinking why we expect toilet rolls to be white, when bleached toilet tissue isn’t really any more natural than dyed pink rolls.
More on that later…
The environmental impact of coloured toilet paper
In the last few years, the coloured toilet rolls that used to be common in the UK have mostly gone the way of the dodo. In our opinion this is a very good thing!
The widespread use of dyes in manufacturing is adding billions of tons of often harmful chemical materials to water systems around the world. Some dyes are more harmful to the environment than others, but all take energy and materials to manufacture, package, and transport. And all add an extra step to the process of toilet paper manufacture.
At the end of the day we’re talking about a cosmetic alteration that doesn’t impact the functioning of toilet paper, a product that’s designed to be literally flushed down the loo. We don’t think the extra environmental footprint is worth it.
When undyed toilet paper is still made using dyes
Since dyes come with a hefty environmental price-tag, you might think the obvious solution for eco-conscious manufacturers is to skip the colours. Sadly, that’s not always the case.
Many companies have decided to ditch the dyes when it comes to their tissue, but when you look at what they’re wrapping it with, it’s a different matter altogether.
Several of the premium brands sold in the UK, even those made by more sustainable toilet paper manufacturers, come individually wrapped in paper that has been dyed bright colours.
These colourful wrappings are designed to catch your eye on store shelves or make your Instagram bathroom aesthetic pop. They are typically heavily inked paper, often using more than one colour or black dye, which poses particular risks to the environment.
What about plain white toilet paper?
Hopefully by now you’re convinced that dyes have no reason to be involved in making toilet paper. So does that mean plain white rolls are the best for the environment?
While it’s great to go without dyes in tissue or unnecessary wrapping, plain white rolls are still “coloured”, because they’ve been chemically altered with bleach to change their natural shade.
There are no raw materials that you can use to make toilet rolls that come in the bright white we’re all used to. Pulp made from wood or bamboo will naturally be coloured brown, and Pulp made from recycled printer paper will naturally be coloured grey.
But these colours aren’t seen as appealing to customers, so most toilet paper manufacturers bleach their pulp to make it white. In fact, bleaching pulp for toilet paper goes right back to the origins of commercial toilet roll in the mid-1800s, when manufacturers proudly sold their bleached paper as a more hygienic alternative to using old inky sheets of newspaper!
But the days of using newsprint as an alternative to toilet paper are far behind us, and we think it’s time to update the standard.
Bleaching toilet paper often involves harsh chemicals that damage the health of rivers, seas, and soil. The harshest is chlorine, which produces by-products that are extremely damaging to animal and plant life, but even “chlorine-free” bleaching options rely on other bleaching agents like oxygen or hydrogen peroxide. While these are less environmentally harmful, they still involve extra processing steps, meaning more packaging, more energy, and more resources.
At the end of the day, a bright white toilet roll - no matter how it’s been bleached, has been coloured at a cost to the environment.
The naked truth about toilet paper
So, what does truly naked toilet paper look like? It’s unbleached, undyed, and it doesn’t need a fancy wrapper to impress. At Naked Sprout, we’re proud to deliver our soft toilet tissue rolls in the natural, neutral shades of their raw materials.
For our bamboo toilet paper, paper kitchen towels, and boxes of tissues, the colour is a very pale brown - the natural shade of bamboo pulp.
For our recycled toilet paper rolls, the colour is also light brown but a slightly warmer shade that you might recognise. This is because they are made from recycled cardboard boxes collected from the area around our factory.
We don’t bleach or dye our rolls, and we certainly don’t dress them up in layers of glossy packaging. Colours and fads come and go. But when it comes to coloured toilet paper, the greenest rolls will be brown!
Want to try our naturally coloured tissue products?
