Why Aren't Toilets Brown?
- Kevin Lankes
- Oct 24
- 6 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YoFlZQQG2YU
Let’s just get this out of the way right now, but you poop in toilets. It’s where poop goes. Let’s just get it out of our system. Just like it goes right out of the plumbing system. Because of this fact, it would seem to make a great deal of sense for toilets to be the color brown, so that, in our easily grossed-out human sensibilities, we wouldn’t have to struggle with the remnants of whatever we ate yesterday that isn’t completely ready to take the dive down the porcelain louge. No, it’s not an olympic contender, it’s just a lima bean.
Like, we as a society are really grossed out by human waste. It’s probably an evolutionarily selected trait, because human waste is full of all of the things that are no longer useful and nutritious and of course, it can also spread disease. Being repulsed by poop is very likely a baked-in human trait. Just like somebody’s baking brownies, right now, in a bathroom near you.
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You guys probably know about the poop stuff, but what you might not know is why the place where you poop isn’t poop colored so that we can see every single disgusting mark and streak that slowly slithers its way into the deep darkness below. But in the meantime, it simply stares upward, taunting us.
And I had a lot of ideas going into this, and I’m still going to go over some of them, but it turns out that the real reasons why toilets are white are mostly kind of a let-down. There are lots of random theories about this but not a lot of hard realities, and I want to talk about that, too, because there’s just a lot of crap about crappers.
But the real bottom line is the bottom line. Basically, like most everything else in our current supply and demand-focused society, it’s just all about cutting costs. Toilets are white because the most common material we use to make them is naturally white. The kind of porcelain we use these days to make toilets has a specific glaze on it that turns it into something called vitreous china. It’s not a final fantasy party member, or a Magic the Gathering card from the New Phyrexia pack. It’s a porcelain glaze.
Vitreous china happens to be white. Of course, there are countless design blogs out there that claim all kinds of other reasons for the color of toilets. I don’t fully believe there to be a lot of evidence for any of them, except for maybe one standout. But these are things like design principles and the aesthetics of cleanliness. White materials supposedly ‘feel’ clean. I guess because you can very easily see if anything gross has accumulated on them. One claim is that this made it really easy for hospitals and other business and industrial settings to ensure their facilities were clean, and this just ultimately became institutionalized and standardized for everyone.
The one other argument I could definitely see as a contributing factor also happens to involve profit. We live in a post-abundance consumer-driven hellscape, and nothing screams heavenly perfumed notes of capitalism louder than the phrase “resale value.” The lucky color of move-in-ready domiciles, you ask? That’s right, you guessed it, it’s white. Bland, blank, white, ready for the next dreamer to imagine themselves and all of their stuff in. So we must absolutely make sure that nobody living in our society today expresses their personality in any way, and simply waits inside their own house as if it’s a graveyard for their soul, biding their time endlessly, until the day they can pass on their perfectly white commode to the next characterless miscreant who will perform the same vigil. We have a painfully beautiful way of ruining ourselves at the slightest suggestion of a profit margin.
So anyway, shitters!
Another design thing I’ve seen from the sources I’ve searched through tells me that the color white makes an area appear larger than it really is. I have no way to verify this with my own eyes, and I don’t understand from a physics sense how the color of an object inside a room might accomplish this, but maybe since overall, bathrooms are white, this is a possibility? Something about the mechanics of light on vitreous china? I don’t know. If you know, please get in touch in the comments and let’s figure that one out.
White glazes are also very chemically stable. They’ll stand up under constant water flow and will survive being subjected again and again to harsh soaps and cleaning products and disinfectants. This is one good reason that toilets aren’t brown, or any other color in any considerable volume. Because glazes of other colors contain pigments that can fade over time under everyday bathroom conditions. I mean I don’t know about your bathroom conditions, but I go hard in there. So if you’re pondering life’s mysteries atop a nonstandard throne, day after day, for years at a time, you’re going to end up with some splotchy wear and tear that wouldn’t otherwise show up on vitreous china.
So yeah, toilets are white because that’s what makes manufacturers and homeowners the most money. Everyone can agree on a neutral color like white, and so no one bothers mass-producing and installing nonstandard colors because there are simply too many options on the spectrum and you could end up alienating a huge number of potential homeowners.
Honestly, I was expecting to find out that a lot of the aesthetics of cleanliness stuff was going to be the main reason why toilets are white. I was anticipating our puritanical American protestant work ethic moralizing around cleanliness and godliness to be the biggest reason for the color of our commodes. But then again, the modern toilet as we know it wasn’t invented in America, it was invented in England. The first flush toilet was likely invented in one possible case somewhere in the medieval period by an anonymous inventor, and possibly also once for Ralph de Cromwell, and then again, this time for sure, by John Harington for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I, in the 16th century. Before this in Europe you’d find something called a garderobe, which is basically a tiny outcropping on a higher floor with a hole in the seat, and if you’ve played any Kingdome Come Deliverance 2 lately you would have seen these everywhere. Finally, the flush toilet was standardised with an S-trap for odors in the 17th century and manufactured at scale by none other than Thomas Crapper. Yes, that’s partially why we call it that, but crap was also a known word with that meaning before then.
There’s also probably something about the solitude of the modern bathroom. Pooping was at various time periods across history a social activity. The Romans did not enjoy to gab with their neighbors, but in the medieval period that row of benches with holes in them was a lot like the barber shop or the news stand. It was the tiktok of its day. We all know when the majority of users are hopping on tiktok. Well, same thing went for King Richard I. On a related note, a castle he built was also the spot of a successful siege during which attackers climbed up his poop pipes and entered the castle through the latrines because he’d built the shafts carrying the waste all the way to the ground.
So maybe you don’t like the bland modern toilets of the modern day. But if there’s one thing you’ll never have to worry about, it’s getting surprised by attackers climbing up your plumbing in full plate mail. It’s a trade-off.
Just to reiterate, it looks like toilets are white so that we can all collectively share the profits of a neutral design decision, for a product that’s easily manufactured and standardized in housing development.
I included one source down in the didgeridoo that’s from a ceramic company, and it’s clearly translated from mandarin, and very poorly, so I’d encourage you to check that out if you’re up for further exploration of this topic in an immensely silly way. You will learn things like the white toilet is similar to the principle of an aunt’s towel.
Honestly this whole investigation about why toilets aren’t brown reminds me of that pirate joke I heard twenty years ago. The fearless captain called out for his red pants anytime a ship was spotted on the horizon because he never wanted his men to see him bleed. And then one day a whole armada showed up on the horizon and he called out, “bring me my brown pants!” Why would it just be his pants? He’d want a whole red like, pirate suit. But it’s just the pants cuz it works for the joke.
And don’t you joke around, instead make sure to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe to the channel. And share this around if you have friends you’d like to also understand the history of modern crapper design. I’ll see you in the next one.
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