How Polyester Bounced Back
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
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...
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.
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.
> '... 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.