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Not all “red” is created the same and accurately producing these subtle differences in color is important for maintaining brand integrity in the sports and fashion worlds. Image source: Flickr user kennethkonica

Anyone who isn’t convinced that color accuracy in textiles is important simply needs to check out the tailgate areas at college football games. Say you’re at a Nebraska-Oklahoma pregame tailgate. (Yes, these rivals no longer play in today’s changing college football landscape, but please play along for the sake of this example.) If you think the school colors for both teams are red and white, chances are pretty good you’re going to be rejected by both sides and miss out on some great food, beverages, and company. As any good Cornhusker knows, Nebraska is scarlet and cream, while the Sooners are crimson and cream. Those two colors may be very close to each other on the color wheel1, but on Saturdays it’s almost as if they’re on opposite ends. The subtle differences in uniform colors matter—and this idea carries over to all areas of textile color accuracy. When testing the color accuracy of textiles, spectrophotometers offer an ideal method of evaluation. And when using spectrophotometric instrumentation, how you prepare the textiles to ensure an accurate color reading is crucial.

Dyeing different types of textiles require different techniques because of the differences in the texture of the fabrics. Image source: Flickr user jillyspoon

The Ultra-Scan VIS can accurately measure carpet color because it takes texture into account. Image source: Pixabay user Frantisek_Krejci

A hotel chain has hired an interior designer to replace the old carpet design in every guestroom with something that looks more sleek and modern. After sifting through a number of swatches, the designer finds the perfect shade: a simple charcoal grey design that will contrast beautifully against the crisp white comforters and bed sheets that the hotel uses. But in order for the interior designer’s vision to truly come to life, the carpet color needs to be consistent from room to room. Not only does every guest room have to match, the hotel also needs to ensure that the carpeting looks seamless from the entrance of the room to every corner. If the hotel receives rolls of carpeting that vary in color even slightly, it will make every seam more obvious–the hotel will end up with a room that looks more like a patchwork quilt than a chic, modern space (commonly referred to as a “carpet sidematch problem”).1

This is just one of many reasons carpet manufacturers should take accurate color measurements of their products before releasing them on the market. However, it isn’t always easy to measure carpet color, even when you use color measurement tools like spectrophotometers. Because carpeting is soft, uneven and not always entirely opaque, analyzing the color of your samples can be frustratingly complicated. An instrument such as the UltraScan VIS, however, simplifies this process by allowing for optimal measurement methodology and the highest degree of color measurement precision. Unlike many other spectrophotometers on the market, the UltraScan VIS instrument is specifically designed to measure carpeting (among many other sample types), and makes the color quality control process fast, simple and extremely accurate.  

The Challenges of Analyzing Carpet Color

Carpet swatches seem easy to analyze at first glance, especially when designs feature just one solid color. However, carpeting is never truly “solid” in color, even if it appears so to the naked eye. If you look carefully at any carpet swatch, you’ll see that the tiny particles that make up the sample frequently vary in opacity, shape, and color. These three factors pose a number of challenges for manufacturers.   

Challenge #1: Opacity

Opacity is one of the first challenges you’ll come across when you try to measure the color of your sample using a spectrophotometer. Many carpet products are slightly translucent, and this becomes more obvious when you change the backing of your sample. For instance, your slightly translucent carpet sample will look lighter when backed by a light-colored background, but that same sample will appear much darker when backed by a dark-colored background. In order to get an accurate measurement, you have to standardize your sample backing.

Challenge #2: Shape

Carpeting isn’t flat. Rather, the material is flexible, and the tiny threads that make up the sample can shift with even the slightest pressure. The non-homogenous nature of carpeting makes it difficult to measure color unless you use tools specifically designed to handle textured samples. When a color measurement instrument presses into a carpet swatch, it creates a pillowing effect. The tiny carpet particles bend around the instrument’s measurement port, and this in turn can cast shadows that alter the overall color reading. To fix this, you need to take several readings in succession, then average those readings to get an accurate measurement.

Challenge #3: Color

Finally, the color of your sample or the type of dye that you use can cause a few unexpected problems for color measurement instruments. The most common problem that you may come across is the use of fluorescent dye in carpeting. This dye makes the product appear brighter and whiter than it is, and it is frequently used in white carpeting.2 Although this dye makes your products look whiter and potentially more appealing, it also makes your samples more sensitive to UV light. When your sample is exposed to the UV that naturally occurs in your light source, it can alter the overall measurement result, making your product appear lighter. This is why you need to cancel out the impact of UV on your sample or take UV into account when you measure your product’s color.

Pile heights and texture can significantly affect the appearance of your carpet samples. Image Source: Unsplash user Dane Deaner

The weaving pattern in denim can make it difficult to consistently spread the dye and achieve the desired color consistency. Image source: Flickr user Muffet

A key to achieving success in the fashion market is ensuring consistency throughout a line of clothing. A line of shirts has to have the same type of cut, quality, and color to maintain the integrity of a brand.

Because denim can be one of the toughest fabrics to work with, maintaining color consistency from factory to factory for a particular brand of jeans is extremely difficult. Heaven help the parent who comes home with a pair of jeans that may match the popular brand and style at school, but that includes a denim that isn’t quite the right color because of a dye process that was slightly incorrect. You might as well have picked up a pair of jeans out of the neighbor’s garbage can.

Ensuring consistent color measurement throughout a roll of denim requires a manufacturer to make use of precise measuring equipment, such as a spectrophotometer.

The colorfastness of silk tends to be lower than that of other dyed textiles, which is a challenge for silk manufacturers. Image Source: PxHere user Monika Stawowy

Silk is one of the most sought-after textiles in the world. Its beauty and plush texture makes it ideal for creating luxurious evening gowns, soft sheets, and chic scarves. However, silk is also one of the most difficult textiles to work with; not only is it expensive to produce in large quantities, it’s also prone to color fading and has notoriously low colorfastness.

This is why silk textile manufacturers must test their silk products for color consistency and fastness throughout the manufacturing process. Using spectrophotometry, you can ensure that your dyes saturate the silk completely and that the silk retains its color even after prolonged washing and sun exposure. When you use an advanced spectrophotometer that is designed to meet the specific needs of the textile industry, you’ll ensure that your silk products won’t fade after just a few washes.

Why Silk Textiles Are Prone to Color Fading

The greatest challenge silk manufacturers face is that silk does not hold dye as well as some other textiles. In contrast to materials like cotton yarn, silk tends to fade more quickly when exposed to the sun or prolonged washing. If a silk textile’s colorfastness is low, then that could result in poor color saturation, color inconsistencies in the final product (like a fabric that appears mottled), and bleeding.1

But why is silk so difficult to dye properly? Researchers studying the properties of silk suspect that it is due to the stripping of the material’s natural protective layers during manufacturing. A study conducted by the National Institute of Sericultural and Entomological Science found that a sticky protein called sericin plays an important role in raw silk.2 Sericin protects raw silk from sun damage and color fading. However, if manufacturers degum their fabrics to remove stickiness and improve texture, then this protective layer is also removed, resulting in a textile that’s prone to color loss.

Even when manufacturers choose not to degum their silk, color fading can still occur depending on the type of mordant used. For example, silks that are mordanted with iron oxide show only slight color fading, whereas those mordanted with aluminum tend to fade significantly. This is why many manufacturers take preventative measures throughout the manufacturing process to prevent color loss and improve the colorfastness in their products. 3 You can improve colorfastness in your silk products by using an iron oxide mordant, coating your product in a thin layer of protective polymer film and by testing your silk products for colorfastness and consistency using a spectrophotometer.

When you coat your silk textiles in a thin polymer film, you can improve colorfastness. Image Source: Pixabay user Wokandapix

The Grey Change scale can help detect the amount of fading that occurs in different textiles after they’re washed. Image Source: Max Pixel

A homeowner decided to wash a set of red living room curtains for the very first time, carefully following the cleaning instructions listed on the label. He avoided bleach products and washed the curtains on the delicate cycle setting. But despite his diligence, the color nonetheless faded significantly after washing; his once-red curtains were now a shade of faded pink, and they no longer matched the color scheme of the living room.

This is a common challenge that textile manufacturers face, whether they’re dyeing textiles for curtains, blankets, clothing or any other colorful fabric. If a large-scale textile manufacturer fails to identify problems with fading or color bleeding in its products early on, it could lead to customer dissatisfaction later. Yet there is a solution to this problem. Using the Grey Change and Grey Stain color scales, which are included in the software packaged with some advanced spectrophotometers, textile manufacturers can identify both fading and bleeding early on in the dyeing process. These two color scales are specifically designed to analyze color fastness and dye durability, allowing manufacturers to refine their dyeing processes and invest in the most durable dyes for their products.

The Problem with Some Colorful Textile Dyes

Certain textile dyes are more prone to fading and bleeding than others and environmental factors like exposure to UV rays or frequent washing can significantly alter product color depending on the chemical makeup of the dye.1 This is why textile manufacturers must consider the color fastness of the dye being used for each product, as different types of dyes will have different benefits and downsides.

The term “color fastness” refers to a dye’s durability against fading and bleeding; a dye that has excellent color fastness will be durable and long-lasting, even when exposed to environmental factors that cause color fading or bleeding. A dye with poor color fastness won’t be as durable. For instance, one type of dye that is known for its excellent color fastness is an azoic or naphthol dye.2 These dyes produce bright, bold colors, especially in the red and orange spectrum, and are highly resistant to fading in the wash or even when exposed to bleach. Conversely, acidic dyes tend to be resistant to color fading when they’re exposed to sunlight, but they’re much more prone to fading and bleeding after washing. Here are a few more examples of common textile dyes and their typical color fastness:

• Basic: Excellent light and wash fastness.
• Disperse: Good light and wash fastness, but sensitive to nitrogen gas.
• Direct: Fair lightfastness, but very poor wash fastness.
• Reactive: Great light and wash fastness, but prone to bleeding excess dye unless it’s washed well during manufacturing.
• Mordant: Good light and wash fastness, but only available in a small range of colors.
• Premetallized: Good light and wash fastness, but only available in a small range of colors.
• Sulphur: Fair light and wash fastness.
• Vat: Excellent color and wash fastness. It’s perhaps the most durable textile dye used by manufacturers.
• Fluorescent brighteners: Fair wash fastness, but very poor lightfastness.

While this basic list of color fastness can give you a general idea of which textile dyes will be the best choice for your textile products, the list isn’t foolproof. For example, although sulphur dye is generally fairly resistant against color fading after being washed or exposed to sunlight, some manufacturers have found that certain sulphur-dyed yarns will occasionally fade after about six months of use. This is why it’s important to test your dyes for true color fastness using the Grey Change and Grey Stain scales; every dye reacts differently with each fabric you use, so by testing each new product in advance, you may produce more durable, colorful textiles.

Textile dyes vary in color fastness depending on the chemical makeup of the dye or the type of fabric that a manufacturer uses. Image Source: Shutterstock user Pichit Tongma

Accurate color matching is essential to creating high-quality products in the textile industry. Image Source: Unsplash user Charisse Kenion

If you work in the textile industry, you understand the complexities inherent to creating the perfect hues. From raw materials to processing methods, the final appearance of your textiles depends on a plethora of variables that must be closely monitored in order to produce the colors you want. As such, color quality control is a core component of the product development and manufacturing process, helping you ensure that your products live up to your vision.

However, the textile industry faces unique challenges when it comes to implementing robust color quality control systems. One of the most significant challenges is identifying illuminant metamerism, which can be a serious barrier to color matching. Without the ability to control for this phenomenon, your ability to achieve your desired result is compromised, potentially leading to unnecessary waste and reduced efficiency. As such, investing in technologies that can alert you to illuminant metamerism is essential to producing just the right hues.

Changes in light source can drastically alter how we perceive color. Image Source: Unsplash user tu tu

By 3:00 am, it’s already on Twitter. At 7:00 the phone is ringing, and the morning just got hectic. Your primary cotton source, a Vietnamese plantation, lost its storage facilities and much of its crop to a major mudslide. Nobody was hurt, but you’ve got to find a new supplier to have any hope of completing the orders already in your pipeline.

That’s no problem. Saved in your files is a three-page list of cotton suppliers, from New Zealand to Spain. A quick look and you find a Turkish plantation that can ship bales down the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic, without a significant price difference. But it’s too bad—you’ve been buying from the same company for years, and you already know that the Turkish cotton will require you to adjust your dyeing process.

It’s not exactly a secret that color consistency can be affected by any change in the location in which a fiber is grown, made, or dyed.1 And if garment manufacturers have more opportunities than ever in a global marketplace, they also have more competition—should you deliver a late or unsatisfactory order, there is always another manufacturer eager to step in and demonstrate their reliability. Every time you lose productivity because of color discrepancies, you risk losing business.

Spectrophotometers Increase Lab Dye Efficiency

But objective color measurement is achievable with spectrophotometric technology. Samples of incoming fabric shipments from suppliers can be scanned and their color assigned an objective numerical value using the Hunter l*a*b coordinate system.

Knowing the color of a fabric before it enters the lab for dyeing allows you to save time by reducing trial-and-error waste. Previous dips might yield information on how a given fabric—Moroccan wool, for example—reacts with specific dyes. Access to this data allows you to more accurately predict which dyes will render a color to match your standard. And by positively identifying that an incoming fabric sample is exactly the same color as a previous sample, you can produce a standard-matching dye in very few trials.

By systematically reducing color disagreement with spectrophotometric analysis, the number of lab dye cycles can be reduced, opening up days or weeks in your lab dye schedule—and perhaps even allowing you to take on a larger volume of orders.

The dyeing process is made easier by having data from previous batches on hand. Image credit: Flickr user Kevin Jarrett (CC BY 2.0)