Home Textiles | Monday, December 20, 2010

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THE SCIENCE OF SUPIMA: Why you sleep better in sheets made from Supima

By Nancy Boyd

NEW YORK—Why do sheets from Supima feel so much more luxurious than sheets made from ordinary cotton?

Why do they seem softer?

Silkier?

Why do they keep those properties through repeated machines washings?

Consumers have been led to think it’s the thread count or the manufacturer’s machinery that makes one set of sheets so much better than another. But that’s only a small part of the story.

The real difference comes from the fiber.

Ordinary cotton fibers are much shorter than Supima cotton fibers—and even the best specialty fibers aren’t as reliably long, strong, and luxurious as Supima. Why does fiber length matter? Because the shorter the fiber, the more the resulting fabric will be prone to pilling and shrinkage.

Proof?

State-of-the-art wear-testing and exhaustive comparison studies conducted by the world-renowned textile technology expert Yehia Elmogahzy Ph.D., Professor of Fiber and Polymer Engineering at Auburn University, who substantiated Supima’s structural superiority—-all the way down to the molecular level.

To prove that, blind tests were conducted that measured bed sheets made of varying fiber compositions and thread counts against sheets made from pure Supima Cotton.

Sheets were measured for their resistance to wear and tear—including an especially rigorous test known as “Taber Abrasion.”

In every single test, Supima was measurably ahead of the competition. (It even outlasted the cotton sheets that contained a high percentage of polyester.)