My affinity for black clothing ultimately means I wear a lot of grey.
A few washes, even in cold water, always turns my nice new dark threads into grubby looking garments.
But there’s hope. I see the um, darkness at the end of the wash cycle.
A team of English chemists from the firm DyeCats, has developed a no-fade dye.
According to one of the chemists, black is the hardest colour, and the most popular – more than 50 per cent of clothes are black. I?believe it too, because I’m sure that more than 90 per cent of my clothes are black.
A bonus to this breakthrough black dye is that it’s green. Maybe not in colour, but in process.
It uses polylactic acid from natural resources, replacing the traditional oil-based dyes.
The polylactic acid is also biodegradable and is carbon neutral.
Oil-based dyes are not derived from plastics, but the process is also not so environmentally friendly. They typically use lots of water, lots of heat, and make lots of waste.
It’s also pretty inefficient, with each fabric (cotton, wool, polyester) needing a different process, and a different nasty  chemical for each type of textile.
All that effort, and the things fade in a few washes anyway.
Well this new dying process doesn’t use water. Using lactic acid, the dye binds to the polyester thread as it is being made, and it stays there.
And it’s not only black that they’ve developed. It’s all colours, which will make my husband happy. He got some nice green tie-dyed jeans after they were put in the wash with my new green pashmina.
DyeCat has also developed a process to dye natural fibres in a sustainable way. Blended materials (cotton/lycra, wool/polyester, for example) are dyed separately in traditional methods, but these chemists have found a way to dye them together, in one step – liminating the environmental impact of multiple steps.
Their processes work not only on textiles, but also for automotive plastics, and other polymers. They can even integrate ultra-violet protection into polymers, so I’m thinking that there will be some pretty sweet sunglasses to go along with my pitch black dress.
And soon to come: hair dye that doesn’t have nasty ammonia, resorcinol, or paraphenylenediamine, which are the main causes of allergic reactions from hair dyes.
I’m very much looking forward to a chemical-free wardrobe – one that stays looking the way I bought it. I’m getting too old for the rock and roll faded T-shirt and jeans look.