Dr Alice White

Hello.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I think you have to bear in mind what job we're thinking that this is going to be doing.

So there was a lot of descriptions in the research that I found of scraping as the sort of technique for how you'd use this, which I think is probably a bit different.

Not the word we'd use for what we want to be doing with our toilet paper today.

Yeah, I don't remember it from school, but I do have vivid memories of going to the public toilets at the seaside.

And, you know, you really, really didn't want to have to use that stuff.

If you had a packet of tissues in your bag, that would be preferable anyway.

So a lot of the claims were based around what people knew the disinfectant could do rather than what the toilet paper could do.

So the disinfectant did disinfect.

But one researcher wrote in their notes, it seems that the antiseptic or disinfectant qualities of the paper are nil.

It is pure eyewash.

So they were fully aware that this wasn't doing anything at all to benefit the paper.

to benefit your backside.

But what's really interesting, I think, from my research is what people thought about it.

So they used branding on the paper, green cross on a white background to have this really medical image.

And surveys showed that people thought it was more hygienic.

And the other thing was that this association of toilets with dirt was so strong that some people thought that toilet paper was unclean.

So a lot of people asked, thought that the disinfectant was to clean the paper itself so that you were bringing something clean into your home rather than something dirty.

Yeah, so I think it's worth remembering the context of this.