Unbleached Toilet Paper vs White Toilet Paper - what's the difference?

Life is all about choices. Chocolate ice cream, or vanilla? Cats or dogs? Tea or coffee? Brown toilet paper or white.... wait... WHAT.

Brown toilet paper or white toilet paper? But I don't know the difference, how am I supposed to choose?! (we hear you cry)

We personally love both!

Our naturally coloured toilet paper, otherwise known as unbleached toilet paper, or even brown toilet paper, is the same silky soft, strong Cheeky Panda quality that you love. It's just made slightly differently, so today we thought we'd explain what the difference between white and unbleached toilet paper really is.

Let’s start at the beginning. All our cheeky toilet roll begins its life as a humble bamboo shoot. Once it’s big and strong, it’s harvested from our FSC-certified forests and chopped into small pieces before being left to naturally ferment for a few days.

You’re still following right? Okay good.

During the fermentation process, the bamboo darkens in colour, sometimes even turning black - the only problem is, nobody, wants black loo roll!

Both our white, and unbleached rolls are placed in a washing solution which helps to sterilise the bamboo and ensure its squeaky clean ready for the next stage of the manufacturing process. The washing solution will slightly lighten the bamboo chips which gives us our lovely natural, unbleached colour. 

Our white rolls however, have an additional step in the manufacturing process. This is a technique called Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF). This uses Chlorine Dioxide to give our toilet rolls an even lighter colour. If you aren’t familiar with this process, it might sound a bit worrying, but we promise its 100% safe and is way more environmentally friendly than other whitening methods used by other loo roll manufacturers.

Now, we know there's not much transparency around this process, but it’s just the way it works:  all loo rolls, including those sold as "unbleached" on the market, will have gone through this process to make sure it’s totally germ free. That's why we prefer calling The Cheeky Panda's brown rolls Naturally Coloured - we think it's less misleading, and has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Once this step is complete, the rest is pretty much history: the bamboo chips are added to water to make a pulp. This white or natural coloured pulp is then converted into big paper reels, before being cut to size to fit perfectly in your bathroom... If you want to get down to the finest of details,  it might be a little more complicated than that, but we did a blog on this very topic a few months back, so if you like details as much as we do, you can check it out here!

I guess it leaves just one last question. Are you team Naturally Coloured toilet, or team White toilet paper? 

We hope this blog made the difference between the two clearer. Thanks for reading and if you have any other questions, please leave them in the comments box below!