Hmm… if it’s alive, how do you wash it? Or do you just water it and let it eat your dead skin and body oils as nutrients…?
I don’t think I like that at all.
(And yes I did read… about half of this, and skimmed the rest looking for an answer. It’s only about how it works and how it’s made, i don’t think they considered that practicality at all for this research, but I may have missed it)
There is a bit about glycerol-plasticization and the chemical solvent resistance resulting, but I’m not really sure how well that translates to household clothes washing, nor the mechanical stresses involved.
All in all very cool, but making clothing from it doesn’t really sound super practical at this point, to me.
Rather than targeting long-lifetime wearable garments, these materials are more naturally suited to short-term or single-use textile-like systems where environmental sustainability is prioritized. Representative use contexts include biodegradable packaging, temporary exhibition or artistic textiles, and architectural display installations, settings in which conventional materials often persist environmentally despite brief functional lifetimes.
In the context of living textiles, additional metrics such as washability, abrasion resistance, breathability, and wearer comfort have not yet been systematically evaluated and will require further co-optimization of biological and material parameters for practical translation.
Hmm… if it’s alive, how do you wash it? Or do you just water it and let it eat your dead skin and body oils as nutrients…?
I don’t think I like that at all.
(And yes I did read… about half of this, and skimmed the rest looking for an answer. It’s only about how it works and how it’s made, i don’t think they considered that practicality at all for this research, but I may have missed it)
There is a bit about glycerol-plasticization and the chemical solvent resistance resulting, but I’m not really sure how well that translates to household clothes washing, nor the mechanical stresses involved.
All in all very cool, but making clothing from it doesn’t really sound super practical at this point, to me.
Briefly addressed in the discussion: