Remember the toilet paper faux shortage of the early pandemic era? Well, at least one niche market has seen a flood of business directly because of it, according to them.
Though Sydney Cano, of Arlington, Va., bought and installed her bidet attachment during the pandemic, she views the timing as coincidental rather than causal. Even before covid, she says, her Muslim friends in particular had recommended the appliance. (The Quran has specific instructions about cleanliness, and bathrooms in Muslim countries tend to have bidets of some kind.) Cano only wishes she would’ve listened to them sooner: She is now a die-hard bidet lover, who has since converted her then-boyfriend and her mom.
“No exaggeration, my life was literally changed,” she says. “I can’t live without mine now. Realistically, I will never go through the rest of my life without using mine. I have a travel one, so I’m never without it.”
Despite the wave of new converts, the United States still lags far behind many other countries when it comes to bidet ownership. (Americans, meanwhile, lead the world in per capita toilet paper usage.) About eight in 10 Japanese households, for example, have toilet-bidet combos, according to a 2018 government survey. In 1975, Italy passed a law requiring every residence to have a bidet. You’ll find them throughout Europe, Asia and South America.
The market stateside appears only to be expanding. While just 6 percent of U.S. adults already have a bidet in their home, an additional 41 percent are interested in owning one, according to a YouGov poll. Lin, of BidetKing.com, has recently sold his wares to American hotels and even highway rest stops.
He says he’s observed a marked difference in Americans’ attitudes toward bidets, especially in the comments on his company’s Facebook ads. Pre-pandemic, “there’s a lot of, ‘Oh, my God, this is so weird.’ ‘Oh, why would anyone want to do this? I’ll just wipe, thank you very much.’” Now, he says, those types of remarks appear much less frequently.
It helps, he says, that bidet converts tend to be an enthusiastic bunch. “A bidet user — they can’t stop talking about it with their friends. They’re telling their friends about it, they’re telling their family. … Just because you can go out again doesn’t mean you’re just going to switch back to toilet paper. We’ve got you for life.”
I had an embarrassing experience the first time I encountered a bidet, which I then thought was a fancy toilet. It took me quite a while to send down the drain what I had left there, thinking it would flush.Report
We got a bidet attachment for our toilet. It is nice, but that is it. When I hear about how it was “life-changing” for some people, I wonder if they just did a really poor job of wiping their butt.Report