You may wear black clothes daily, but when you go to work out or spend time in the sun, you probably look for lighter colored clothing. Dark fabrics, especially black fabrics, absorb the heat from the sun and transfer that heat right to your skin. It doesn’t help your workout at all.
A new finish on fabric called coldblack made by textile company Schoeller Technologies makes for a new class of functional clothing. With coldblack, darker colors can be worn in the sun without worries of providing extra heat. The heat bounces off the textile rather than shooting straight through.
An additional advantage to coldblack is protection from UV rays. The fabric provides a minimum Ultraviolet Protection Factor (UPF) 30 when applied to any textile. This protects against UV-A rays and UV-B rays.The company tested fabric treated with a coldblack finish on a simulated torso in simulated sunlight. The simulated torso is a cylinder with the dimensions of the human body with individual layers of material to replicate the layers of human skin. The experiment was conducted to determine heat capacity and heat conducting. In a test that measures the effect of simulated sunlight without sweating, a black coldblack polo shirt displayed a temperature increase of approximately 5-degrees Celsius, or 9-degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature was lower than a non-treated black shirt.
A second test was conducted with simulated sweating. Measurements show that, when exposed to simulated sunshine, a coldblack shirt requires only about half as much perspiration water as a tested black shirt to achieve the same torso surface temperature. The coldblack shirt results were similar to that of a beige shirt. “This means that the wearer of a coldblack shirt only perspires about half as much as the wearer of a conventional black T-shirt in order to compensate for the increase in skin temperature,” it says in company documents.
The coldblack finish can be applied to any color fabric and clothing to reduce the heat build up of the wearer. It can also be used on fabrics that wick and have other functional properties to combine performance results.
Official coldblack site.