I get sometimes old ones will but I have brand new pants that pill every time I wear them. Just from them touching chairs. Not even from washing. Why the heck does this happen? Is there a way to prevent it? I just shave them off.
In: 105
Fun experiment: Bend you arm all the way to your bicep, lick your palm and rub it in a circular motion where the forearm and bicep make a crease. You’ll notice quickly that your arm hairs ball up in a tangled mess to make little pills.
The pills on fabrics are the same thing. If the fabric has a lot of lose fibers/lint sticking off it they will eventually tangle together to make the pill.
I’m a professional fabric developer.
The yarn that makes the fabric is not just 1 long strand but made of many tiny fibers spun together to make 1 uniform yarn.
Long staple fibers, such as Supima/Pima cotton are less likely to pill due to less fibers needing to be spun together to make yarn.
Long staple fibers are expensive so short fibers are used for many cheaper yarns, which in turn make cheaper clothes.
There are also 2 types of polyester yarns, spun and filament. Spun poly is made similarly to cotton where short fibers of polyester are spun, whereas filament yarn is 1 long strand of poly, spandex is a filament and 99% of polyester t-shirts are spun.
Now when you rub the fabric over and over, the little fibers that make up the yarn start to unravel and clump together, causing pill balls.
Pilling is a sign of cheap fabric and/or not properly following care labels.
Rope is made of strings twisted together, strings are made of threads twisted together, threads are made of fibers twisted together, and so on. On the micro scale, fabrics are covered in fuzz from all those teeny tiny twists breaking over time from wear and tear. Your pants are covered in split ends.
Even completely brand new, the fabric is always “damaged” because that’s just how fabric is made.
All those fuzzy frayed fibers are like velcro to each other and will get tangled up by the slightest contact. For a visual example, look up “felting”. The concept is the same, where the air between the fibers is slowly reduced as they tangle tighter and tighter together into little pills.
Me, a non-native english speaker, reading the title of this post: why do who do what 🙄?
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