Looking for a white dye for polyester

Name: Ron

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Titanium Dioxide Powder

Titanium dioxide is a pigment and will not stick to fabric unless you first mix it with a binder. A good binder for traditional oil paintings is linseed oil, but to make fabric paint you should buy a product called fabric medium.

Dye polyester and poly/cotton blends

Country or region: USA

Message: I am looking for a white dye in a powder or dry form. I see it in liquid form but that does not help me. It has to go onto polyester using heat. I will buy a lot of this from you if you can help me. I have tried titanium dioxide but it does not stick. Thank you for your help.

Sorry, but there is no such thing. Since dye is transparent, a white dye would be colorless, just like water, and would have as little effect. A dye cannot ever cover up any darker color that is behind it. That's why you can't find a true white dye. Heat-transfer dyes for polyester are called disperse dye, but there is no such thing as white disperse dye. (See "Dyeing Polyester with Disperse Dyes". )

To cover some of the color already on a surface with white, then, you can't use a dye, but you can use an opaque pigment. However, unlike dyes, pigments do not have any ability to stick to the surface. In order to make a pigment stick, you have to mix it with something that will act as a glue. Titanium dioxide is a good white pigment, but, like any pigment, without a binder to glue it on to the fabric, it will just fall off. If you mix it with an acrylic fabric medium, then it can stick; dry heat treatment may be necessary to make the effects of the acrylic binder permanent. (Mysteriously, a web search reveals a couple of Chinese companies listing titanium dioxide as though it were a disperse dye; this must be due to a translation problem, since, as you found out the hard way, titanium dioxide simply is not a disperse dye, and cannot stick to the fiber without some sort of glue.)

The mixture of a pigment with a binder is called paint. You shouldn't use just any paint on fabric, because many of them dry to be stiff, hard, and scratchy. For painting fabric, you need to buy special fabric paint. Many fabric paints are just as transparent as dyes, so you have to look specifically for an opaque fabric paint. Some fabric paints will bind to natural fibers, but not to synthetic fibers such as polyester, so be careful to choose an opaque fabric paint whose manufacturer specifies that it will work on synthetic fibers. Jacquard Products makes a line of opaque fabric paints called Neopaque that is supposed to work on both natural and synthetic fibers. You can buy it in small jars, or special order it in quart- or gallon-size bottles, from a supplier of fabric dyes and paints. You mentioned, however, that you don't want your white "dye" to be in liquid form, which takes away the option of any sort of fabric paint. Is there any sort of heat-set glue powder that can be mixed with a pigment and then melted on to the fabric? Or are you simply trying to avoid full-fabric immersion, since you do not want a solid color? There is more than one way to solve that particular issue.

Instead of dye or paint, a third alternative is dye discharge. Many (though not all) dyes can be removed by chemically damaging them, either by oxidation or by reduction. (See "What chemicals can be used to remove dye?".) This is true of both cotton dyes and polyester dyes, but it's impossible to predict whether the dye in any particular commercially dyed garment is dischargeable, and suppliers of discharge printing inks generally say that their products are intended only for natural fibers. Chlorine bleach will discharge many dyes, but it can be damaging to polyester, forming ugly yellow stains that cannot be removed. Reductive discharge chemicals are a better choice for polyester. You apply them either by heating the polyester in water with the discharge agent, or by painting or stamping or printing them on in liquid form and using heat to activate the discharge; the specific method varies according to the chemical you choose. It cannot be applied by dry transfer methods, as disperse dyes are.

A technique you may want to look into is discharge screen printing, but the discharge agent must be one that is compatible with polyester; most screen printing discharge inks are intended for use on cotton. In theory, a discharge ink based on zinc formaldehyde sulfoxylate should work on most polyester dyes, but in practice the ones I see for sale are not recommended by their manufacturers for use on polyester. Experimentation might show that it works for some polyester dyes, but not for others, just as it works for some cotton dyes, but not others. For more specifically appropriate products, try a web search using the terms "discharge disperse dye polyester" (without the quotes).

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Posted: Monday - September 26, 2011 at 02:00 PM

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Looking for a white dye for polyester

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