Great article on the history of performance fabrics. The last bit leaves me wanting to learn more about innovations to make them more environmentally friendly.
From my own experience, the tendency for polyester to be smellier than natural fibers relegates it to my workout clothes. Most of the time I'm wearing cotton.
A huge source of micro-plastics [0][1]. My wife and I have attempted to cut out as many plastic sources in our household we have to come into contact with, including switching away from polyester clothing to cotton, linen and wool where possible.
From article: "A polyester textile is the same PET material (polyethylene terephthalate) as a plastic soda bottle, only extruded into a filament rather than molded into a container. Like the bottle, the fiber repels water. It’s hydrophobic. That’s a nice quality in a fleece jacket but a sweat-trapping horror against the skin. To reach its performance potential, polyester needed not simply to keep out moisture but to move it.
‘The body is really fussy. It doesn’t like hot, humid conditions right at skin level. Move that humidity a millimeter away and it’s a whole different ballgame’, explains Randy Harward, who spent more than 40 years developing products and materials in the outdoor apparel industry. Once off the skin, moisture becomes a valuable buffer against wind and chill. In hot weather, it can evaporate and keep you cool. The trick is getting it to that sweet spot."
Yea, no thanks. For weightlifting and running, switching to 100% cotton shorts from Bonobos and Chubbies feels much better, lighter weight, cooler, and less sweaty and harsh on my skin than polyester synthetic material. In addition to the concern I have for potential endocrine disrupting properties of plastics, there's already so many plastics we are exposed to on a daily basis I'd rather not have them directly against my body and skin throughout the day.
Endocrine disruption (potential) of plastics in constant contact with skin is something I sometimes worry about, more for my kids than myself, but I'd like to ask anybody more knowledgeable if it really makes a difference: aren't cotton and polyester both dyed with synthetic dyes/paints, and that's ultimately what's in contact with our bodies? If this is a source of endocrine disruption, won't cotton affect me just the same? Wouldn't I have to wear undyed, natural color cotton to make a difference?
Just because something is "synthetic" doesn't mean it's toxic. Plastics, or rather the additives used to make plastics soft, flexible, water-repellent, etc., are now known to have a specific set of toxic (or endocrine disrupting) effects on biological systems. Other synthetic substances may have none, or different ones. Textile dyes don't contain any endocrine disrupters as far as I know, but they certainly might have other ingredients that aren't very good for you. Also, some bioactive substances may be easily absorbed by the body, others not. There's a lot about all this that we just don't know.
Personally I'm not very worried about absorbing endocrine disrupters through the skin from clothes, but I avoid polyester clothes because a) I don't like the way they feel on my skin, and b) because of the environmental effects (washing them creates micro-plastic pollution, and eventually they become plastic trash).
But it should be pointed out that cotton is also an environmental villain... in cotton agriculture huge amounts of herbicides and pesticides are used, even more than for most other crops. And even if the dyes don't have any significant effect on the health of the wearer, the process of dying textiles produces lots of environmental toxins and probably isn't good for the health of the people working in that industry.
So in relation to the environment and polyester vs cotton you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The one thing you can do is consume less... keep clothes longer, mend them whenever at all possible, or just go full naturist! ;-)
> including switching away from polyester clothing to cotton, linen and wool where possible.
I’ve been going through the same thing lately. My daughter had offered to show me how to naturally dye and sew my own clothes if I get the undyed fabric. I’m eager to take her up on that.
>> For many people. . .the polymer is the worst form of planetary pollution since oil spills. Some of that attitude is cultural snobbery, a marker of class allegiance not that different from Ralph Lauren eschewing synthetics in the early ’80s.
There it is! HN cant help itself. I love that one of the citations is literally “naturalclothing.com” that seems like a very neutral source.
> Yeah, no thanks.
I mean you are entitled to the subjective opinion about how comfortable cotton is to work out in, but the objective reality of the mass market is that polyester is hugely popular as a technical fabric. I go backpacking and cotton essential doesn’t exist in the back country, everyone is either sporting wool or synthetics. Wet cotton is cold, rough and doesn’t breathe. I love high performance natural fibers, and own a lot of wool and down, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that polyester has advantages over wool (less so down).
Is there any evidence that plastic can enter our body transdermally? I find it extremely unlikely and honestly quite far-fetched given everything I know about the skin.
Wow, went down that rabbit hole, and what awful reporting, spammed all over the place without real attribution. It wasn't even published/reviewed, it's BioRXiv with heavy promotion.
However, I did find a paper with something other than breathless commentary on microplastics. Interestingly, it's mostly unwoven PE/PS fabrics that generate microplastics, except in the case of nylon which decays in UV. Also many allergies due to synthetic contact are due to coatings (for wear and flammability) not the materials themselves.
Speaking of polyester for athletics, I have not found that they’ve eliminated the problem of the shirt trapping odor. I have some golf and workout shirts that are absurdly comfortable but smell when they come clean from the laundry. I don’t perspire that much but the odor seems to get worse the longer I own the shirt.
Same. Soak in baking soda and water overnight then wash again. Gets rid of the build up. Repeat when you notice the smell again. I know the smell you mean, it’s like ghost BO. It is to BO as la croix is to soda.
I have a nano-spun PET hardshell. It is so breathable that I can honestly say that I find it to be more breathable than the cotton t-shirt I wear underneath, while also being waterproof.
PET can be made to be much more breathable than common natural fabrics.
In the outdoor activities space advances in materials have really been revolutionary (and not just clothing). When I first started doing winter hiking and related activities seriously in the early 90s, I was definitely in the natural fibers camp including wearing cotton when it seemed reasonable to do so.
These days? I even wear polyester around the house in winter most of the time. (Merino wool is actually my go to a lot of the time--albeit more expensive and more delicate. I wear a lot of cotton Ts in the warmer months however.)
There's also been a real revolution in lightweight packs, tents, etc. More broadly. It's all much better than two or three decades ago.
Malden Mills is also (only something of) a feel-good story. The owner kept paying salaries and rebuilt after a very bad fire in the late nineties and received a lot of praise at the time. However the company went bankrupt a few years later partly as a result.
People used to climb mountains in hobnail boots. The history leads to a funny grading system where relatively easy rock climbs (if you have suitable equipment) fall into the ‘extremely severe’ categories.
It's not like polyester resists forever either. Many outdoors folk have experienced "wet out." Resistance only goes so far and I'd rather wear wet wool than wet polyester.
Synthetics are still great though. They have many other benefits and are easy enough to avoid soaking through.
Many synthetics have a PFOA or PFOS treatment to provide the water resistance, which are pretty terrible chemicals when you end up exposed to them all day on your clothing. They also wear off rapidly with normal use, so previously water-resistant clothing loses that property after a few months to a year depending on how often it is worn and washed.
Thinking about it now, I could see how it started on the shoulders, where the straps of my backpack are, and on my back. Basically everywhere where (different) backpack(s) and straps thereof applied load, pressure, friction.
And even when wool is wet, it still keeps you very warm.
As a young person in scouting, our troop master demonstrated this very effectively with cotton, poly, and wool socks and an ice bath. The wool sock still felt warm, were as the cotton was icy and the poly only a little better.
Even if you don’t there’s potential to develop comfort with it. I grew up with extremely itchy military surplus wool blankets. I thought I’d resent that my whole life… now having gone through a variety of other fabrics and fibers, I’d certainly prefer a nicer wool but I wouldn’t complain about those blankets anymore. I adjusted and came to appreciate them, and even learned to care for them so they’d be more comfortable.
Often "natural" means cotton, but I'm fed up with it. It's often poorly made and doesn't last long, or takes forever to dry, or holds onto moisture too long otherwise.
Polyester just lasts so much longer, even in a blend.
I've gotten to a point where I prefer wool, synthetics, linen, or hemp. Some cotton garments I love but for the most part I'd be happy without any 100% cotton fabric.
I used to love wool, but the place we moved to seems to attract carpet beetles; they are back within a year of fumigation. Essentially all of my woolen clothing has holes in it now.
Yeah that's a downside of wool for sure. We've dealt with similar wool-eating insects and it's no fun. I hope you are able to get the problem resolved.
> Researchers spent months attacking the problem, eventually developing a chemical treatment that made moisture move along the fiber’s surface.
> '... Each of these fibers can ... allow the sweat to move away.'"
> The key innovation turned out to be a knitted structure called differential denier, which used two sizes of polyester fiber. The larger fibers stayed next to the skin, where they pushed sweat outward.
One thing I've never understood about 'moisuture-wicking' fabrics, including wool: The wicking needs directionality to be useful, it seems: What makes the moisture move in the desired direction, and not, for example, toward your skin or spread around your skin, etc.?
> The wicking needs directionality to be useful, it seems: What makes the moisture move in the desired direction,
I assume you're thinking of some sort sort of chemical gradient.
I can't comment on petro-chemical fibers but in the case of wool you have two key structures.
1. Wool has Cuticles on the surface (much like human hair) which act as shingles against large droplets (like rain).
2. Wool has a fiber Cortex which in the case of wool will adsorb liquid that penetrates past the cuticles (such as the vapour generated while sweating).
Cortex adsorption is an important part of why wool in particular is special as a natural fabric.
The water molecules create a chemical bond with the outter surface of the cortex of the fiber, meaning moisture is sandwiched under the outter cuticle, on the outter surface of the cortex of the fiber.
This is the main reason why wet wool does not 'feel' wet against your skin. No heat exchange occurs with the water in the wool via direct conduction (you sort of aren't really touching the water it is sort of trapped in a kernel).
When you 'feel' cold with a wet cotton shirt it is because the water molecules on the shirt are getting heated up by your skin heat (mostly) via direct conduction. In wool this water content is effective air gapped away from you.
I don't like that this article makes it mostly a binary of polyester against cotton. There's a wide variety of fabrics available that could do a better job of solving environmental issues in clothing. This article makes no mention of semi-synthetic materials (e.g. rayon, tencel, viscose), which have gentler land-use and actually biodegrade.
> If there’s a problem today, it’s that people like polyester too much. It’s everywhere, even at the bottom of the ocean.
So much of the article leads with industry trying to make polyester happen, and then doesn’t question putting these two sentences together? It’s everywhere, and you have to try really hard not to buy it. Products matching “100% cotton” are often filled with it. People don’t necessarily like it, they might just not know they’re buying it.
I wonder why despite their ubiquity, there's almost no public awareness of polymers and their properties (outside of 3D printing enthusiasts), especially when compared to woods or metals. [a] I'm reminded of this by the slight misnomer of polyester fabric, which is actually polyethylene terephthalate (PET); the name polyester is more suited for polyurethane ester, and pairs with polyether (polyurethane ether). There's something similar with Styrofoam. [b]
At some point I decided to learn how to distinguish plastics (beyond relying on resin codes [1]), and found this excellent online tool [2] intended for museums to identify what plastic artefacts are made of based on easily observed properties. It also has general info for each type of polymer, including typical modes of degradation. I find great irony in how most common plastics nearly unpreventably degrade to unusable condition over the scale of decades (think, brittle old rubber bands or cracked and yellowed vintage computer cases), considering how the microplastics they degrade into are notorious for sticking around for millenia.
Learning about plastics has explained some phenomena I'd noticed before but had no idea behind the causes of:
- Why CD and cassette cases, both made of brittle clear PS (polystyrene), make a distinct sound when tapped and are so often cracked.
- Why some small plastic bags are milky clear, waxy, and not crinkly like most plastic bags: those are qualities typical of transparent PP (polypropylene); most bags are made of LDPE (low-density polyethylene).
- Why the black plastic of some food trays (e.g., those of microwave dinners) has a telltale wood-grain-like surface finish--this seems to be an unintentional trait of injection-moulded temperature-resistant food-safe PP.
[a] A decent fraction of people could say that steel is an alloy of iron with higher strength, that copper is commonly used in electrical wires, that pine is relatively soft and light, or what plywoods and fibreboards are made of.
[b] Styrofoam is a brand of extruded polystyrene foam (EPS) board used as insulation, but the genericized use refers to expanded polystyrene foam (XPS) instead. More trivia: Plastic bags and foam are just as recyclable as rigid plastics (not counting the economic reasons behind most plastics recycling going to landfill anyway)--most municipal recycling plants reject them simply because they're difficult for machines to handle.
Glad to learn more about polyester! Still slightly concerned with health and environmental effects, but Uniqlo largely changed my life and enabled me as a minimalistic nomad — 10 sets of base layers are almost ridiculously light and low-volume, and they last years with minor stretching and no discoloration or mechanical wear.
So much so that when Uniqlo switched sports socks to mostly cotton, I started buying 60~100%-polyester ones from other brands (Miniso or more expensive athletic marquees).
Aside from extreme packability and lifetime, they are all water-repellant and dry extremely fast. Accidentally pouring a drink all over myself results in very low absorption into the fabrics followed by complete evaporation within minutes.
Edit: I’ll add that I hope Uniqlo expands its recently piloted (in NYC) repair program to all of its stores globally (following in the steps of Patagonia). The latest generation of edgy iPhones make pockets on my shorts and pants fail ahead of time and it’s a trivial repair.
44 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 34.5 ms ] threadFrom my own experience, the tendency for polyester to be smellier than natural fibers relegates it to my workout clothes. Most of the time I'm wearing cotton.
From article: "A polyester textile is the same PET material (polyethylene terephthalate) as a plastic soda bottle, only extruded into a filament rather than molded into a container. Like the bottle, the fiber repels water. It’s hydrophobic. That’s a nice quality in a fleece jacket but a sweat-trapping horror against the skin. To reach its performance potential, polyester needed not simply to keep out moisture but to move it.
‘The body is really fussy. It doesn’t like hot, humid conditions right at skin level. Move that humidity a millimeter away and it’s a whole different ballgame’, explains Randy Harward, who spent more than 40 years developing products and materials in the outdoor apparel industry. Once off the skin, moisture becomes a valuable buffer against wind and chill. In hot weather, it can evaporate and keep you cool. The trick is getting it to that sweet spot."
Yea, no thanks. For weightlifting and running, switching to 100% cotton shorts from Bonobos and Chubbies feels much better, lighter weight, cooler, and less sweaty and harsh on my skin than polyester synthetic material. In addition to the concern I have for potential endocrine disrupting properties of plastics, there's already so many plastics we are exposed to on a daily basis I'd rather not have them directly against my body and skin throughout the day.
[0] https://www.technologynetworks.com/immunology/news/microplas...
[1] https://www.naturalclothing.com/what-is-polyester-fabric/
Personally I'm not very worried about absorbing endocrine disrupters through the skin from clothes, but I avoid polyester clothes because a) I don't like the way they feel on my skin, and b) because of the environmental effects (washing them creates micro-plastic pollution, and eventually they become plastic trash).
But it should be pointed out that cotton is also an environmental villain... in cotton agriculture huge amounts of herbicides and pesticides are used, even more than for most other crops. And even if the dyes don't have any significant effect on the health of the wearer, the process of dying textiles produces lots of environmental toxins and probably isn't good for the health of the people working in that industry.
So in relation to the environment and polyester vs cotton you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. The one thing you can do is consume less... keep clothes longer, mend them whenever at all possible, or just go full naturist! ;-)
I wouldn't make that assumption. The Ames Test returns positive results on many natural products.
I’ve been going through the same thing lately. My daughter had offered to show me how to naturally dye and sew my own clothes if I get the undyed fabric. I’m eager to take her up on that.
There it is! HN cant help itself. I love that one of the citations is literally “naturalclothing.com” that seems like a very neutral source.
> Yeah, no thanks.
I mean you are entitled to the subjective opinion about how comfortable cotton is to work out in, but the objective reality of the mass market is that polyester is hugely popular as a technical fabric. I go backpacking and cotton essential doesn’t exist in the back country, everyone is either sporting wool or synthetics. Wet cotton is cold, rough and doesn’t breathe. I love high performance natural fibers, and own a lot of wool and down, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that polyester has advantages over wool (less so down).
Is there any evidence that plastic can enter our body transdermally? I find it extremely unlikely and honestly quite far-fetched given everything I know about the skin.
https://www.inputmag.com/style/microfibers-clothes-fashion-p...
However, I did find a paper with something other than breathless commentary on microplastics. Interestingly, it's mostly unwoven PE/PS fabrics that generate microplastics, except in the case of nylon which decays in UV. Also many allergies due to synthetic contact are due to coatings (for wear and flammability) not the materials themselves.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972...
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.25.428144v3
PET can be made to be much more breathable than common natural fabrics.
These days? I even wear polyester around the house in winter most of the time. (Merino wool is actually my go to a lot of the time--albeit more expensive and more delicate. I wear a lot of cotton Ts in the warmer months however.)
There's also been a real revolution in lightweight packs, tents, etc. More broadly. It's all much better than two or three decades ago.
Malden Mills is also (only something of) a feel-good story. The owner kept paying salaries and rebuilt after a very bad fire in the late nineties and received a lot of praise at the time. However the company went bankrupt a few years later partly as a result.
This is actually wrong and misleadingly glorifies poliester.
Wool does not absorb water, wool _adsorbs_ water and this makes all the difference in the world.
For instance a jacket made from Burel Wool would need hours of continous deluge before ever getting you wet on the inside.
Synthetics are still great though. They have many other benefits and are easy enough to avoid soaking through.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27139705
Thinking about it now, I could see how it started on the shoulders, where the straps of my backpack are, and on my back. Basically everywhere where (different) backpack(s) and straps thereof applied load, pressure, friction.
Polyester just lasts so much longer, even in a blend.
I've gotten to a point where I prefer wool, synthetics, linen, or hemp. Some cotton garments I love but for the most part I'd be happy without any 100% cotton fabric.
> '... Each of these fibers can ... allow the sweat to move away.'"
> The key innovation turned out to be a knitted structure called differential denier, which used two sizes of polyester fiber. The larger fibers stayed next to the skin, where they pushed sweat outward.
One thing I've never understood about 'moisuture-wicking' fabrics, including wool: The wicking needs directionality to be useful, it seems: What makes the moisture move in the desired direction, and not, for example, toward your skin or spread around your skin, etc.?
I assume you're thinking of some sort sort of chemical gradient.
I can't comment on petro-chemical fibers but in the case of wool you have two key structures.
1. Wool has Cuticles on the surface (much like human hair) which act as shingles against large droplets (like rain).
2. Wool has a fiber Cortex which in the case of wool will adsorb liquid that penetrates past the cuticles (such as the vapour generated while sweating).
Cortex adsorption is an important part of why wool in particular is special as a natural fabric.
The water molecules create a chemical bond with the outter surface of the cortex of the fiber, meaning moisture is sandwiched under the outter cuticle, on the outter surface of the cortex of the fiber.
This is the main reason why wet wool does not 'feel' wet against your skin. No heat exchange occurs with the water in the wool via direct conduction (you sort of aren't really touching the water it is sort of trapped in a kernel).
When you 'feel' cold with a wet cotton shirt it is because the water molecules on the shirt are getting heated up by your skin heat (mostly) via direct conduction. In wool this water content is effective air gapped away from you.
So much of the article leads with industry trying to make polyester happen, and then doesn’t question putting these two sentences together? It’s everywhere, and you have to try really hard not to buy it. Products matching “100% cotton” are often filled with it. People don’t necessarily like it, they might just not know they’re buying it.
At some point I decided to learn how to distinguish plastics (beyond relying on resin codes [1]), and found this excellent online tool [2] intended for museums to identify what plastic artefacts are made of based on easily observed properties. It also has general info for each type of polymer, including typical modes of degradation. I find great irony in how most common plastics nearly unpreventably degrade to unusable condition over the scale of decades (think, brittle old rubber bands or cracked and yellowed vintage computer cases), considering how the microplastics they degrade into are notorious for sticking around for millenia.
Learning about plastics has explained some phenomena I'd noticed before but had no idea behind the causes of:
- Why CD and cassette cases, both made of brittle clear PS (polystyrene), make a distinct sound when tapped and are so often cracked.
- Why some small plastic bags are milky clear, waxy, and not crinkly like most plastic bags: those are qualities typical of transparent PP (polypropylene); most bags are made of LDPE (low-density polyethylene).
- Why the black plastic of some food trays (e.g., those of microwave dinners) has a telltale wood-grain-like surface finish--this seems to be an unintentional trait of injection-moulded temperature-resistant food-safe PP.
[a] A decent fraction of people could say that steel is an alloy of iron with higher strength, that copper is commonly used in electrical wires, that pine is relatively soft and light, or what plywoods and fibreboards are made of.
[b] Styrofoam is a brand of extruded polystyrene foam (EPS) board used as insulation, but the genericized use refers to expanded polystyrene foam (XPS) instead. More trivia: Plastic bags and foam are just as recyclable as rigid plastics (not counting the economic reasons behind most plastics recycling going to landfill anyway)--most municipal recycling plants reject them simply because they're difficult for machines to handle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code
[2] https://plastic-en.tool.cultureelerfgoed.nl/
So much so that when Uniqlo switched sports socks to mostly cotton, I started buying 60~100%-polyester ones from other brands (Miniso or more expensive athletic marquees).
Aside from extreme packability and lifetime, they are all water-repellant and dry extremely fast. Accidentally pouring a drink all over myself results in very low absorption into the fabrics followed by complete evaporation within minutes.
Edit: I’ll add that I hope Uniqlo expands its recently piloted (in NYC) repair program to all of its stores globally (following in the steps of Patagonia). The latest generation of edgy iPhones make pockets on my shorts and pants fail ahead of time and it’s a trivial repair.
I can't help but feel we are salting life on earth and that this will eventually be a much bigger problem than the climate crisis.