Like all trends eventually matching your toilet paper to the rest of your bathroom eventually died out. By the mid-1980’s it became very difficult to find colored toilet paper anymore.
Not only did the pastel colors and matchy-matchy home decor styles of the 1950’s become unfashionable but there were concerns about the dyes in the toilet paper being bad for the environment.
Toilet paper has the color white because it’s bleached. Without the bleach, the paper would be brownish in color. Companies don’t make coloured toilet paper anymore because dying the bleached paper lots would cost them more money.
Chlorine bleaches paper really white and also removes the woody compound called lignin from wood pulp, which causes the yellowing of paper when it’s exposed to sunlight, as happens with newspapers.
Yes! You can still buy colored toilet paper. A quick search on Amazon brings up toilet paper available in every color of the rainbow. You can even get patterned toilet paper or paper with the president’s face on it.
The toilet paper appeared in France in the 60’s and was originally greyish. The colour pink was chosen by marketers because people associates it culturally with purity and mostly with the softness of a healthy young skin.