Color analysis of natural colorant-dyed fabrics

Colors from naturally dyed fabrics recently have attracted both consumers and manufacturers in fashion markets. Even though color attributes of the fabrics have been partially observed in some literature, a data base of colors for natural colorants in fabrics needs to be established and the colors to be characterized according to systematic color notations and tones in order to relate the traditional natural colors to contemporary color communication systems. Therefore, a study was performed to investigate color characteristics for a given large set of natural colorants-dyed fabrics based on the Munsell color notations. to analyze their tones with relation to the notation such as hue, value, and chroma, and finally to identify the effects of mordanting, an important coloring auxiliary, on the colorimetric properties of the fabrics. As a result., the dominant hue for a total of 350 naturally dyed fabrics was yellowish families followed by reddish and purplish ones in the Munsell notation owing to the use of leaves and plant as usual natural dyestuff, which confirms the limit of color hues of the fabrics. Color value for most of naturally dyed fabrics was generally higher whereas the chroma was lower, which means that most of colors for naturally dyed fabrics tended to be bright and weak shaded. Grayish, light grayish, and soft tones were the main tones of natural colorant-dyed fabrics. All of hue, value, and chroma were found as being influenced by mordanting in that more particularly; it-on mordanting was likely to cause the decrease of both value and chroma for most of naturally dyed fabrics. These results could provide a systematic color data for naturally dyed fashion fabrics and suggest a future direction of color development for them. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.