Material Matters: Dye And Colour

It’s strange to consider that boldly coloured textiles were once a rarity, only accessible to the rich and often imported from distant, exotic places. These days we can easily get shoes and clothes in just about any colour we can imagine. Modern industrial chemists have a solid understanding of the chemical processes that go into colouring fibres, but it must have seemed like magic when the process was first discovered thousands of years ago.