To Dye For: How Toxic Fashion Is Making Us Sick--and How We Can Fight Back

Textiles are cheap. But the chemistry that imbues fabric with performance qualities? That is something else. Chemistry can have name recognition—Milliken’s Visa fabric and 3M’s Scotchgard are two examples. Chemistry can be a trade secret, its true composition and potential health effects obscured from the government and consumers for decades. Plus,

Swan put the blame squarely on “the ubiquity of insidiously harmful chemicals in the modern world” and especially “chemicals that interfere with our body’s natural hormones.” These are endocrine-disrupting chemicals. And they include a lot of fashion’s favorite finishes and ingredients: lead, mercury, arsenic, phthalates, APEOs, PFAS, and bisphenol

Jäger was deeply concerned about aniline dyes. “The assertion that aniline dyes are only injurious when they contain arsenic, is entirely erroneous; they are chiefly noxious because of their volatility,” he wrote. In other words, they can easily come off the fabric as fumes or in sweat. In 1880, he published the first of several booklets on the top

Today, thanks to synthetic mauve dye, fossil fuels are the basis for an infinite catalog of textile finishes, pesticides, detergents, pharmaceuticals, glues, plastics, faux leathers, synthetic fabrics, inks, and more. Who would have guessed that 150 years after Perkin peered at his purple fabric, chemistry’s core role in fashion would be almost ent

Fashion products have some of the most complicated and multilayered chemical profiles of any product you or I can buy—without a license, anyway. Multiple chemical substances are used to manufacture, process, weave, dye, finish, and assemble clothing and accessories. Each step in this daisy chain can leave a residue, either intentionally or unintent

“Young children crawl around on the floor a lot, they put their hands in their mouths, and they ingest dust at up to twenty times the amount that an adult would ingest. Children still have developing organs and developing immune systems,” Overdahl told me. Stapleton was infuriated by the results. “We found these in baby pajamas. There could be a go

Cradle to Cradle, which is all about clothing recyclability and biodegradability (it’s hard to do either if something’s got a toxic finish);

It published a list of chemicals that members agree not to use, called a manufacturing restricted substance list, or MRSL.

I wanted to speak to garment workers whose exposure to fashion chemistry isn’t through drinking water or contaminated vegetables but is somewhat similar to ours: touching the clothing fresh from the dye units, breathing in the fibers that are coated with chemicals.