Dye & Dyeing Definition List

How Color Gets Into Cloth

Every colored textile begins with a problem: color wants to wash out, and fiber wants to let it go. Dyeing is the set of solutions the industry built for that problem. In immersion dyeing, fiber, yarn or fabric sits in a bath of water, dye and assisting chemicals, and heat and time drive dye molecules into the fiber, where they bond chemically or lodge physically in its structure. Which stage is dyed changes the product: fiber dyeing gives heathered blends, yarn dyeing gives woven stripes and checks their crisp edges, and piece dyeing colors finished cloth in a single shade. Garment dyeing colors the sewn product and trades precision for a soft, lived-in hand. The definitions on this page are short because the vocabulary of coloration is precise — each term names one variable in that system, and confusing them in a specification can ruin a production run.

Pigment, defined here, is the great exception: pigment color is not absorbed but bound to the surface with a resin, which is how most printed t-shirts carry their designs. A dyer who asks for pigment where dye was meant, or the reverse, will get different hand, different wash behavior and a different bill.

Mordants, Indigo and the Famous Colors

The mordant is dyeing's quiet enabler — a metal salt or other agent that forms a bridge between dye and fiber. Most natural dyes need one; without it, madder, weld and logwood rinse away. With it, dyers coaxed centuries of fast reds, yellows and blacks from plants and insects, and modern natural dyeing still runs on mordant knowledge, including the way iron saddens a color toward grey while alum keeps it bright.

Indigo works by a different trick entirely: it is a vat dye, insoluble until reduced in the vat, soaking into cotton as a pale liquid and turning blue only as air oxidizes it — which is why denim's color sits near the yarn surface and fades so characterfully. Tyrian purple, made drop by drop from sea snails, was priced like treasure and reserved by law and cost for emperors and senators; its chemistry was so valued that its name still means rare luxury. Tie-dye and batik are resist methods — binding or waxing cloth so dye cannot reach it — while thermochromic dyes change color with heat, and dye-sublimation printing turns solid dye to gas that bonds with polyester, the engine of modern sportswear graphics. Eleven terms, the whole story of textile color.