The toilet paper revolution you never knew you needed

Rachel Kurzius

“Do you realise that toilet paper has not changed in my lifetime?” the character George Costanza said in an episode of “Seinfeld.” “… And in 10 000 years, it will still be exactly the same, because really, what else can they do?”

Costanza was sort of correct. Everyone has heard of toilet paper, and pretty much anyone who is going to use it already does. Aside from the very welcome “splinter-free” promise made by manufacturers in the 1930s, the basic premise has remained pretty steady since the 1890s. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been changes. Manufacturers pour plenty of time, money and scientific rigor into a product that most people use without thinking.

In late 2023, Charmin, one of the country’s most prominent TP brands, teased the introduction of “something the toilet paper category hasn’t seen” to its Ultra Soft rolls. The straight line of perforation - the row of tiny holes punched into the paper to make it easier to tear - was no longer straight. It was scalloped.

The company said the waves were the product of five years of research and development. The goal: to prevent the scourge of the dreaded “uneven tear.” You might’ve experienced this - pulling on a square of toilet paper and it rips raggedly. Maybe you get more TP than you bargained for, or perhaps not enough. The horror!

The undulating perforation is designed to create a smoother tear. Indeed, Charmin named the innovation Smooth Tear (Procter & Gamble, the parent company, has applied for a trademark on the phrase - the trademark for the more specific Charmin Smooth Tear has already been approved.)

Charmin has deemed its innovation a success. It is “driving significant level[s] of delight and 5 percent growth on the Charmin business,” Procter & Gamble CEO Jon R. Moeller said in the fourth quarter 2024 earnings report. The scallops received a burst of media attention, and they enjoy a modest fandom, even if they didn’t transform the toilet paper world. They also provide a window into the corporate quest to improve this most mundane household product.

Barry Kudrowitz, professor of product design at the University of Minnesota and author of “Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design,” characterises the scalloped edge as “incremental innovation. If you look at the grand scheme of things, it’s still toilet paper. … The paper is basically just, you know, spreading around stuff.” (Compare that, he says, to what he deems a radical innovation: bidets, which use water rather than paper to clean you up after the bathroom.)

But that’s probably good news for Charmin. “People love incremental innovation. We love it because it’s what we know. It’s in the same toilet paper holder, I use it the same way, but it has a slight benefit,” Kudrowitz says. “Incremental innovation is just so easy for us to just accept.”

That’s why companies are always looking to introduce an upgrade, regardless of how seemingly small scale, that might nudge a consumer to pick their paper.

Kimberly-Clark, a Procter & Gamble competitor that owns the Cottonelle and Scott brands, has 258 patents related to dry bath tissue, per Sneha Shah, vice president of research and development. “It’s not just about the paper itself,” she says. “We actually invented machinery, equipment, processing in order to make … not only better quality toilet paper but make it in large quantities and scale technologies.”

Kimberly-Clark labs in Wisconsin and Georgia are outfitted with machines that create rapid prototypes for potential design changes. Those then go through lab equipment for testing, Shah said. “How does this do under tough situations with a lot of water? Or how do they stand up to a wiping aspect?” are among questions engineers suss out, she added.

That’s how they came up with a different ripple pattern for their Cottonelle paper. “Those textures have changed and evolved,” Shah said. “And really, today, you get a softer, stronger product than you would have 20 years ago.”

Perspirating over perforation is, in part, what brought us to our current conception of toilet paper, which is “actually a pretty modern invention relative to humanity and that’s, you know, simply because paper is a more modern invention,” said Sophia Gholz, author of “A History of Toilet Paper (and Other Potty Tools).”

Modern paper was invented in China during the Han dynasty about two millennia ago, but centuries passed before the material’s use as bath tissue became commonplace. People would instead clean themselves with whatever they had on hand - corn cobs, leaves, shells, you name it. When paper became more readily available beyond the wealthiest echelons, folks would simply reuse items like newspapers and “the Sears catalogue, and then the Sears catalogue went glossy and we stopped using that,” Kudrowitz says.

The idea of selling a paper product specifically for cleaning oneself after the bathroom is most often credited to Joseph Gayetty, who began marketing his flat sheets of “Gayetty’s Medicated Paper” in 1857. The paper promised to treat hemorrhoids, and the New York Daily Tribune wrote that President James Buchanan used it in the White House.

It didn’t quite catch on. “People thought it was ridiculous and quite embarrassing to go into a shop and have to buy medicated bottom wipes,” Gholz said.

Another inventor, Seth Wheeler, first patented perforated paper on a roll - but it was wrapping paper. E. Irvin and Clarence Scott, famously known as the Scott Brothers, put toilet paper on a roll for easier dispensing in 1890. Wheeler followed up with a patent to perforate that more private paper a year later.

“That’s when it became sort of a big deal,” Gholz said. The marriage of the roll and the easily torn squares was marketable. “It was convenience and hygiene, really, that the perforated tear brought to the table.”

Most R&D processes begin with consumer research. Charmin’s scalloped edge is no exception.

The company found that people were frustrated with the “dispensing experience and … paper tearing,” said Liza Sanchez, vice president of research and development at Procter & Gamble. “We wanted to deliver the ideal dispensing experience.”

Once the researchers knew what problem they were solving, they got to work in their Cleveland lab. “We start one roll at a time,” she said, making many of the prototypes by hand. They stamped various perforation designs onto the rolls, or sometimes onto a flat sheet of paper. Then they tested each one to see how much force it took to tear off a square.

“There were many other shapes that we evaluated,” Sanchez said, pairing those various forms with different embossing designs on the paper itself. “Even within the scallop shape, the depth of the wave and the length of the perforation itself, the side of the piece that you don’t perforate versus the side that you perforate - all of that was studied. So we probably went through hundreds and hundreds of prototypes.”

Testing also took into account one of the biggest ongoing debates in the realm of rolls: whether the loose squares ought to hang over or under the roll. “The force and angle at which you dispense will be different when you overhang and when you underhang, and it has to work both ways,” Sanchez said. They looked at how the perforation tears when the roll holder is in front versus to the side, and whether people use their dominant or nondominant hand.

They spent the largest portion of those five years figuring out how to manufacture these scalloped edges on a large scale. “It’s a lot easier from an engineering point of view to deliver a straight line than to deliver that shape,” Sanchez said. The researchers faced what is called a “technical contradiction” - while each square needed to be easy for consumers to tear off, it also had to be strong enough to withstand manufacturing equipment pulling it speedily along before it got into customers’ hands.

Its method of “perforating a nonlinear line of weakness,” as one of their related patents describes it, involves rotating cylinders, positioned anvils, adjacent teeth and other mechanical wizardry.

“The amount of science and engineering that goes behind everyday household products would, you know, baffle the average consumer because we have to think about everything,” Sanchez said.