Ah, god.

Look, nobody likes a public bathroom. They're messy, they're dirty, they've had about 279 people use them at any given hour of any given day. You just do not know what's going to be lurking on the toilet seat when you sit yourself down there after the stranger who has just sit themselves down there a mere minute before you. Most of the time, it's not worth considering - we'd very much prefer to remain in the dark when it comes to the bacteria that other people leave places, thanks. But then sometimes our need to remain as clean as possible gets the better of us and we have t0 knuckle down, grab a load of toilet roll, and line the seat. A great way to ensure our asses stay nice and squeaky, right? Well, not exactly - because it turns out that lining a public toilet seat with toilet roll is actually exposing us to more germs that if we'd just sat down on the seat in the first place. Great. Let's say that you go into a public toilet and sit down - you're exposing yourself to a select number of germs. You use some toilet roll that's been sitting in the stall day and you subject yourself to some more germs. Therefore, if you decided to layer that seat with toilet paper before sitting down, then you're opening yourself up to even more germs via that toilet roll. Get it? You should. Toilet seats aren't actually as dirty as we assume them to be given the amount of time spent on actually cleaning them, so give the toilet roll cover a miss next time, yeah? If you're that worried about germs, just squat over it instead.