[2] It is commonly supplied as a long strip of perforated paper wrapped around a cylindrical paperboard core, for storage in a dispenser within arm's reach of a toilet.

Most modern toilet paper in the developed world is designed to decompose in septic tanks, whereas some other bathroom and facial tissues are not.

[6]During the early 14th century, it was recorded that in what is now Zhejiang alone, ten million packages of 1,000 to 10,000 sheets of toilet paper were manufactured annually.

[6] During the Ming dynasty (1368–1644 AD), it was recorded in 1393 that an annual supply of 720,000 sheets of toilet paper (approximately 2 by 3 ft (60 by 90 cm)) were produced for the general use of the imperial court at the capital of Nanjing.

[6] Elsewhere, wealthy people wiped themselves with wool, lace or hemp, while less wealthy people used their hand when defecating into rivers, or cleaned themselves with various materials such as rags, wood shavings, leaves, grass, hay, stones, sand, moss, water, snow, ferns, plant husks, fruit skins, seashells, or corncobs, depending upon the country and weather conditions or social customs.

Several talmudic sources indicating ancient Jewish practice refer to the use of small pebbles, often carried in a special bag, and also to the use of dry grass and of the smooth edges of broken pottery jugs (e.g., Shabbat 81a, 82a, Yevamot 59b).

[9] The rise of publishing by the eighteenth century led to the use of newspapers and cheap editions of popular books for cleansing.

Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his son in 1747, told of a man who purchased a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina; thus was so much time fairly gained...[10]In many parts of the world, especially where toilet paper or the necessary plumbing for disposal may be unavailable or unaffordable, toilet paper is not used.

[12] Joseph Gayetty is widely credited with being the inventor of modern commercially available toilet paper in the United States.

Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York, obtained the earliest United States patents for toilet paper and dispensers, the types of which eventually were in common use in that country, in 1883.

[14] The manufacturing of this product had a long period of refinement, considering that as late as the 1930s, a selling point of the Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free".

[16] Softer, two ply toilet roll was introduced in Britain in 1942, by St Andrew Mills in Walthamstow; this became the famous Andrex.

It was promoted as a flushable product but it has been implicated in the creation of fatbergs; by 2016 some municipalities had begun education campaigns advising people not to flush used wet wipes.

[19] In 1973, Johnny Carson joked in his Tonight Show monologue about comments made by Wisconsin congressman Harold V. Froehlich about the possibility of a toilet paper shortage.

Subsequently, consumers purchased abnormal amounts, causing an actual shortage in the United States for several months.

[22] During the COVID-19 pandemic, toilet paper shortages were reported in March 2020 in multiple countries due to hoarding and panic buying.

[32] In 2022, British toilet paper packaging started displaying bowel cancer symptoms to raise awareness, following campaigning from blogger and journalist Deborah James, who later died from the disease in June 2022.

A longer roll needs to be replaced less often, but the very largest sizes do not fit all toilet paper dispensers, especially in older homes.

Toilet paper is usually manufactured from pulpwood trees, but is also sometimes made from sugar cane byproducts or bamboo.

Toilet paper products vary greatly in the distinguishing technical factors, such as size, weight, roughness, softness, chemical residues, "finger-breakthrough" resistance, water-absorption, etc.

Compaction of toilet paper in drain lines, such as in a clog, prevents fibre dispersion and largely halts the breakdown process.

Common print colors are pink and pinkish red, also blue, more rarely purple, orange, brown or green.

Another motifs are things associated with "lightness": Clouds, downy feathers, leaves of all kinds, butterflies, flying birds.

In the USA, Great Britain and Japan, the quality feature is that the toilet paper is as delicate and fine as possible.

There are two choices of orientation when using a holder with a horizontal axle parallel to the wall: the toilet paper may hang over or under the roll.

Like table napkins, some fancy Japanese hotels fold the first squares of toilet paper on its dispenser to be presented in a fashionable way.

Special toilet paper insert holders with an oblong shape were invented to prevent continuous unrolling without tearing to discourage this practice.

[citation needed] Other gags include custom toilet paper printed with jokes, stories or politician's images.

[47] Alexander Balankin and coauthors have studied the behavior of toilet paper under tensile stress[48][49] and during wetting and burning.

[58] The higher use in the United States may be explained by the fact that other countries people use bidets or spray hoses to clean themselves.