Toilet paper is convenient, but not sustainable and not efficient.
In the US, toilet paper has been the standard for bathroom hygiene for generations. But even overlooking its environmental impact, it’s questionable as a stand-alone cleansing product. Do you feel completely clean after dry-wiping?
Wet wipes were supposed to be an improvement, but they also have a problematic environmental impact. They also cause plumbing issues and tend to leave tissue residue after use.
As a partial result, interest in bidets developed. Bidets are much better; they significantly reduce paper use. But they aren’t generally available in public settings in the United States yet. And even bidets don’t eliminate all the unwanted residue. There is still some wiping involved.
Personally, before I considered bidets, I’d blow through mountains of paper in an effort to feel clean. So, I started supplementing. I’d add a dab of whatever sanitizer, liquid soap, body wash, shampoo, or even dish soap was within arm’s reach to my toilet paper right before wiping. It reduced the amount of paper I used, and I thought it was genius.
It wasn’t.
I didn’t realize that most cleansers aren’t really healthy for use in that area of our bodies. Our more sensitive areas are generally full of all kinds of functional bacteria that serve important and various purposes. I was stripping the healthy bacteria from my body along with harmful bacteria. I started noticing some gut discomfort after only a few months.
Some “solutions” we’ve passively accepted are not always healthy for us as a species, and they’re having an incremental but cumulative effect on our planet, too. In many situations we try to help but end up causing more damage instead. In line with the principle of correspondence: even though I was trying to improve a process, I was hurting myself.
I couldn’t see any habits changing with what was currently available. Bidets aren’t widely available in public settings in the US. I wasn’t going back to dry-wiping, I didn’t want to keep stripping my system by using disruptive products, and nothing I was doing had any effect on my personal ecological impact.
Since I couldn’t find an acceptable solution, I decided to try and create one. I wanted to make a portable cleanser that could be applied to toilet paper before wiping. It would reduce the amount of paper needed, and would not harm the body’s delicate microbiome or damage the environment.
After lots of research and input from formulation labs, I realized we could potentially make something that had a less specific, but much more useful overall application. If it was healthy for our butt, it could be healthy for our whole body. And not just “non-stripping” but actually biome supportive. We could make an all-over cleanser that would support the skin biome wherever it was used. And if it was truly healthy for us, how could it not be at least benign for the Earth?
From there, the idea grew from a niche hygiene solution into a philosophy about how we treat our bodies and our world. Anti-Soap wouldn’t just make wiping ‘better’; it would make cleaning healthier for us and the planet.
However we choose to clean ourselves, it should be practical and effective, it shouldn’t harm us, and it shouldn’t harm the ecosystems we depend on.
-Anti-Soap founder
