NYLON vs POLYESTER
Polyester is the most common fabric today when it comes to sportswear, mainly because it is a cheap fabric, which has made it today the world’s second most common fabric in clothing.
Most of us have experience with training clothes with a bad smell after only a few times of use. One of the great advantages of the nylon we use is that you avoid smelly garments. The apocrine sweat glands, which you have in armpits and groin – produces nutritious sweat for bacteria (micrococci). When the bacteria break down this nutrient, it smells bad. The hydrophobic (water-repellent) properties cause fats and oils to be attracted to the polymer, which creates problems when washing. The polyester fibers are hydrophobic, which means that they are water-repellent, this property together with its attraction to fats and oils makes it almost impossible to get clean when washing. These bacteria “love” polyester and become virtually impossible to wash off. The more you wash, the more resistant the bacteria become. Should you, against all odds, succeed in getting rid of all bacteria, they will soon be back. The poorer the quality of the polyester, the faster the garment will smell bad. Some garments can even be “consumed” after a couple of workouts. Just the thought of walking around with a bad-smelling bacterial culture directly against the body should make most people think about the next time they buy exercise clothes.
Another disadvantage is that polyester cannot handle stretching in large quantities. Any elongation above 2% can cause a deformation that prevents the material from returning to its original shape. Important to keep in mind when it comes to tights that want to stay in shape even after a squat.
Many brands today use recycled polyester. Of course we think it is good that polyester / plastic is recycled, but not for clothes. PET bottles are widely used for recycling polyester, a product that is a disposable packaging and that we have all learned not to use as a water bottle. That this material should suddenly be used as a garment directly against the body does not sound logical. Here there is too much uncertainty in how much pollutants and toxins are left in the material that is produced as it is difficult to control what is recycled and where it comes from. Mostly cheap polyester is produced outside the EU and the plastic probably also comes from there.
Recycling polyester also means that the fiber becomes weaker, which makes the material worse and also this with a shorter user life as a result. The more times it is recycled, the weaker it becomes.
The combination of bacteria, short life and risk of harmful substances is the reason why we opt out of polyester.
Nylon is in many ways the opposite of polyester. It is significantly more expensive and is therefore not used as often in clothing. It is much stronger and withstands stretching extremely well, which gives a much longer durability than other fabrics.
Nylon is also hydrophilic (water-absorbent) and easy to wash clean. It is resistant to oils and fats, which means that the micrococcus that make a garment smell bad cannot be formed (natural resistance). The nylon is extremely soft and thanks to its strength, it is excellent to make very thin and light fabrics. There is a reason it is called “strong as steel, soft as silk”.
Nylon can also be regenerated, not the same as recycling, as regenerate means that you create a new raw material (Nylon 6) that is as strong as the original. We use ECONYL® which is regenerated nylon from “raw materials” such as collected fishing nets, carpets, textile scrap and nylon waste from the manufacturing industry.
All the fabrics we use are completely free of harmful substances and are certified with Standard OEKO-TEX 100 in class 1, which means that the material is approved for use in baby clothes.
Therefore, we have chosen nylon as the fabric to use for create products with significantly longer durability, which leads to reduced consumption.
