The Pro's & Con's of Natural Dyes

Here at Luna & Rose, whenever we need to dye a fabric to get our dreamy colour palettes perfected, we choose to use Natural Plant Dyes. It might cost us x6 the price vs using a chemical, synthetic dye but for us, that's a no brainer and we're pretty sure your health & skin thanks us for it too!

BUT, there is a reason why not every brand dyes with plant based natural dyes and the expensive cost is just one of them. As you know, we're huge fans of transparency here at Luna & Rose so we wanted to share with you, all that we know about our plant dyes so you too can be more informed with making your purchasing decisions. 

The Pro's and Con's of dying with Natural Dyes:

PRO'S:

• Plant Dyes have minimal impact on the environment. Because they come from natural sources, natural dyes are not harmful to the environment, which makes it so appealing for consumers. Natural dyes are biodegradable and disposing them don’t cause pollution.
• Natural Dyes are Safe & Toxic-free. The way in which our artisan dye house processes our natural dyes means that there are no harmful chemicals or toxins used in the process. In fact - the dyes are so 'organic' you can even drink the dye-juice! 
• Natural dyes are obtained from renewable resources that can be harnessed without imposing harm to the environment. Because they don't rely on non-renewable materials and can be replicated for as long as nature continues to replenish! 
• Zero waste water as the lack of chemicals & toxic products means that all waste water can filtrate out to neighbouring farms to be re-purposed. 
• Easy to produce a cohesive colour palette. Because the 3 base plants used to create the natural dyes remain the same across a variety of color palettes, this means that different colours will always sit well together, creating a beautiful colour palette
• Natural dyes produce an extraordinary diversity of rich and complex colours that are not possible with synthetic dyes. For example, when investigating 2 same colours (1 dyed naturally, 1 dyed with synthetic) under a microscope, a yarn dyed from synthetic does not have the same wealth of colour variation and looks much more uniform. We love this because it gives us creamy, dreamy earthy tones synthetic dye processes can only dream of!

CON'S:

• Experimenting to create the exact natural tone can take longer to perfect meaning you need more time to dye naturally. We also use the sun, where possible, over electric heated driers meaning this can take hours to dry. 
• Dying with plants is more costly (ie. x6 the price of dying with chemicals!) This is due to the time and labour involved in dying in this method as well as growing and harvesting the leaves. But who said we're in a rush? 
• The colour may fade with long exposure to the sun. That's because we havn't penetrated the fibre with toxic colour-fastness chemicals post dying like most synthetic dye processes to. This may mean your plant-dyed apparel will fade if left drying in the sunshine for hours. We highly suggest drying inside or in the shade to ensure longevity of the colour. 
• The availability of Natural Dyes can be limited, depending on where you are located or producing. We are extremely lucky to produce in Indonesia where not only the artisans have such a strong connection to nature and the Earth in which they produce from 

To us, dying with nature is an absolute no-brainer - Less toxins on your body when you wear your clothing each day, much less environmental impact and Zero waste water being right at the top of our reasons why.

You can see our complete process of how we create our dyes colours with plants in the below video.

We would love to know - What do you think about Plant Dyes? Questions, comments, arguments.... Are you for them or don't mind?

Let us know in the comments below we would love to hear from you x