Professor Richard Blackburn is the leader of The Sustainable Materials Research Group at the University of Leeds (Leeds). He and his partner Chris Rayner have spent the better half of two decades studying natural colorants that were used to give textiles their color since ancient times.
Most of the techniques that remove dyes from textiles are rough on the colorant molecule. If the molecule takes damage, the information about its chemical composition is lost.
However, Blackburn and Rayner’s research team devised a gentler way to extract the dye without damaging it. Their new glucose-based method allowed them to study colorants used before the 1850s, when artificial dyes began replacing them.
It so happens that chamomile was one of the popular natural dyes used back in those times. It imparted a bright yellow color on natural fibers like cotton and wool...read more>>>...
