The Bottom Line: Britain Needs to Embrace the Bidet!
For a nation as obsessed with private parts as the UK, it never fails to surprise us here at Riluxa just how few British bathrooms still don’t have a bidet.
They’re more hygienic and better for the environment than toilet paper. And now, thanks to the likes of companies like ours who sell designer taps that look almost too luxurious to fulfil the purpose for which they’re designed, they can even be style statements. So, let’s put aside our perennial war of culture with our Gallic neighbours for a moment and tip our hats to the spotlessly clean-bottomed French who invented and named this wonderful invention.
The line of prudishness
Toilet humour has been all the rage in the UK since the 14th Century when eminent poet Geoffrey Chaucer set quill to parchment to write his mucky medieval magnum opus The Canterbury Tales. And, yet, nearly 700 years later we’re arguably still too prudish as a nation to incorporate into our bathrooms a device that enables us to freshen up our nether regions.
What is wrong with us? The French have been washing their bottoms since at least the end of the 17th Century when the bidet was invented as a development of the rather more charitable device, the chamber pot. So why can’t we finally get off the throne and onto the pony (after which the bidet is named, due to the straddling like stance we take while ‘riding’ it)?
Is it some misguided pursuit of dignity? Because ignoring hygiene requirements is hardly the best way to make them go away. Just because a subject matter may seem unmentionable in polite company doesn’t mean that, behind closed doors, you can’t take care of business, as it were. In fact, it’s rather important that you do. Not just for the sake of your own cleanliness but for that of the planet, too.
The puppy with the long toilet roll may be cute, but…
The World Wide Fund for Nature tells us that the paper equivalent of almost 270,000 trees per day is either flushed or put into landfill and 10 per cent of that is toilet paper. Even back in 2009, a Scientific American report claimed that using bidets could save 15 million trees per year and that was back when the global population boasted a modest 6.8bn people as opposed today’s rather more oxygen grabbing 9.3bn. (So presumably that tree-saving would be closer to 18 million today.)
Yes, bidets are a key to greener living, who’d have thought it? And the result of cutting back on toilet paper isn’t just encouraging greater oxygen levels and biodiversity by not cutting down trees – there’s also all the hundreds of thousands of tons of chlorine we use to bleach that toilet paper that suddenly isn’t being pumped into the oceans anymore. We also save on around 18 terawatts of electricity used to produce that toilet paper and all the petrol used to transport it from manufacturer to warehouse to retailer. The impact is far greater than simply saving trees.
Deck Mounted Single Lever Bidet Tap
A fresh start
Your general sense of wellbeing will be improved by a bidet. The planet will be better off if you get one. And your bathroom will be so much the better for having a bidet in there. The idea that they waste space, are ugly or just aren’t useful is a fallacy invented by people who are still just too prudish to use them (read: Brits and Americans, who are also somewhat useless when it comes to bottom hygiene). For the converted, choosing not to have a bidet in your bathroom is akin to choosing not to have a toilet, i.e. it’s no choice at all.
Thanks to modern inventions like the cute little shower taps you can have installed into your bidet, giving you quite the refreshing experience, publications like Ideal Home are heralding a rise in popularity of the bidet in the coming years. But media predictions of that ilk have cropped up year-on-year for decades now and still the UK lags behind in the orderly derriere stakes. The bottom line is: it’s time we, as a nation, finally caught up. So come on Britain! Bidet or be square.