If the purpose of a toilet is for fecal matter and occasionally vomit why is porcelain the standard option, and why do we keep them white?
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Porcelain is extremely resistant to both of the substances mentioned. Not all are white, but white is easy to make consistent, so it’s cheaper, and many people want cheaper.
Gotta bleach the loo once a week to kill off any bacteria. Other than that, of I don’t see obvious dirt or stains, its clean enough for me.
Do you really want to have a difficult time determining if that toilet seat you are about to sit on is clean? I know I don’t.
Glazed porcelain such as used in toilets and plates and such is so smooth that dirt have a hard time sticking to it. It is also very hard so it will not get scratched very easily. So it is used in places that needs to be easily cleaned. Most toilets are just rinsed off after each use as you flush them and will then become completely clean again. Sometimes you might have to use a light stroke of a brush but rarely any more then this. This is because dirt have a hard time to stick to the glazed porcelain.
The reason we use white is because that makes it easy to spot if the toilet is clean or not. So naturally we associate white with cleanliness. If you have a black or even worse a brown toilet then your mind just automatically assumes the toilet is dirty as you would not see any of the filth.
It’s durable and easy to clean *thoroughly* because once glazed, it’s not porous or reactive to a lot of cleaning chemicals that might damage plastic.
They aren’t *always* white, but it’s easy to see whether it’s dirty/clean, inoffensive, and goes with everyone’s decor.
I clean potties for a living and occasionally people just shit or piss absolutely fucking everywhere. It takes about 2.5 seconds to clean the toilet, and the bathroom will smell fine with a few minutes. The floor and walls are tile and far, far harder to clean. The smell lingers because the poop bacteria got into tiny cracks no scrub brush can get into. Glazed porcelain is a very good thing.
As far as being white, I can also tell you as a cleaner, most carpets and tiles in public places are designed to hide dirt. This makes them hard to clean because you might not see a concealed coffee stain. A dirty floor isn’t the end of the world, but a dirt concealing toilet design would be… terrible. Yuck.
Before COVID I used to go to a nice pizza restaurant and they had spent a lot on the bathroom to try to make it nice but they chose black toilets and that sucked. No way to see if it was clean or not.
Chinaware is made from literally dirt so it’s cheap and did not degrade as quickly as other materials. It also holds it’s shape as opposed to most metals and plastics which is important to the physics involved syphonic flushing, and once glazed has antimicrobial properties and is easier to clean, and inhibits mass evacuation from the bowl.
I worked in sales analysis for a toilet company and we charge more for colors since there is a higher reject rate on the lines and you have to tint, so the market sticks with white.
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