What Do Bears Have To Do With Toilet Paper?

A few weeks ago, Procter & Gamble celebrated National Toilet Paper Day at an event featuring its Charmin brand mascot, Leonard the Bear. When did bears get to be associated with bathroom hygiene?

Over the last few decades. The preponderance of bears on toilet-paper packaging—along with angels, babies, and puppies—derives from the dominance of the major players in the bath-tissue industry. Procter & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly-Clark together control about two-thirds of the market, and their brand icons—the Charmin bear, the Angel Soft baby, and the Cottonelle puppy—showed up in the United States over a 15-year span beginning in the late-1980s.

The first commercial brands of toilet paper emerged 100 years earlier, at a time when the product was rarely associated with specific images. In the 1880s, most were sold as "medicated paper" for treating hemorrhoids or other health problems, and decorated with wordy display copy reminiscent of the labels on Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap.

The Scott Paper Company became the first to offer toilet paper on a roll in the 1890s, and its products were marketed under private labels that each had their own advertising scheme. Many used words and pictures to connote luxury, as in The Waldorf and The Statler, two brands named after fancy hotels. Some showed images of ladies in ball gowns or gentlemen riding in horse-drawn carriages.

By the 1920s, the Scott Company had created its own genteel paper-products spokesman named Mr. Thirsty Fibre. Created in the mold of dapper brand icons such as Mr. Peanut and Rich Uncle Penny Bags (or Mr. Monopoly, as he's now known), Mr. Thirsty Fibre resembled a fuzzy, angry Abraham Lincoln—a gaunt man in a top hat and tails, brandishing his fists at moisture.

A few other manly toilet-paper icons populated the early years of the product, like the grizzled seafarer from packages of Life Guard, but the industry soon adopted a more lady-like approach. The Charmin brand got its start in 1928 with a woman's cameo silhouette on the package—a "charming logo" that connoted femininity and elegance. (Virile cleaning-product icons like Mr. Clean and the Brawny Lumberjack wouldn't show up for another few decades.)

In 1953, Charmin further softened its image by placing a baby alongside the woman. In 1956, the Charmin Lady was bounced altogether, leaving the baby to fend for itself as the brand icon. (She lives on overseas: A modern version of the cameo silhouette now decorates Soft n' Pretty toilet paper in Trinidad and Tobago.)