Toilet paper, a pure cacapitalist story

Before becoming an essential part of our modern daily lives, intimate hygiene after defecation took on extremely varied forms throughout history and across continents, meticulously adapting to local resources, climates, and the customs of each civilization.

In Greco-Roman antiquity, users of public latrines shared the tersorium, a rudimentary but ingenious accessory consisting of a sponge or cloth attached to the end of a stick, which was rinsed in a bucket of salt or vinegar water between uses.

On the other side of the world, during the Nara period in the 8th century, the Japanese favored chūgi, wooden sticks measuring 20 to 25 centimeters in length, specifically designed to clean the anal canal both internally and externally.

At that same time, while China and Japan jealously guarded the secret of papermaking, the rest of the world had to compete to ensure its comfort: depending on the region, people used water, stones, snow, seashells, animal furs, corn cobs, or various plants, while the wealthiest used precious fabrics made from wool, hemp, or lace, and the poorest simply made do with their left hand.

Although Imperial China invented the very first toilet paper as early as the 14th century for the exclusive use of the court, it wasn’t until the 19th century that industrialization took hold of this market, driven by the American Joseph Gayetty.

In 1857, he marketed Gayetty’s Medicated Paper, packs of 500 flat sheets enriched with aloe extracts to soothe irritations and hemorrhoids, thus marking the birth of the first branded toilet paper.

The real structural revolution came in 1871 when inventor Seth Wheeler patented a machine for perforating wrapping paper into rolls—at a time when kraft paper was gradually replacing traditional packaging before the arrival of the bag—a technology he immediately adapted to toilet paper by founding the Albany Perforated Wrapping Paper Company (APW) in 1874. Its worldwide success definitively popularized the roll format we all know.

Introduced in France at the beginning of the 20th century, this product remained for a very long time considered a luxury item inaccessible to the majority of the population, who preferred cut newspaper, until the « smooth bubble-cord » toilet paper, recognizable by its beige color and rough texture, became widespread between 1950 and 1970.

Comfort increased rapidly at the end of the 1950s with the arrival of « crepe » toilet paper, but it was in 1966 that Ferdinand Béghin radically transformed the French market by acquiring a cardboard factory to manufacture a revolutionary paper made from cellulose wadding, infinitely softer, which propelled the Lotus brand and completely democratized its use during the 1970s and 1980s.

Now commonplace but highly technological, contemporary toilet paper has seen the rustic « bubble-string » disappear in favor of ultra-differentiated products, perfumed, printed with patterns or jokes, available in double, triple or quadruple thickness, embodying a permanent industrial quest for softness, resistance and absorbency.