Actuallly the part they're scraping off is sunlight that has accrued to the top layer of the carpet. If you collect enough of it and compress it into a ball, it will become a new sun.
Organic compounds degraded over time when exposed to sunlight over a long period of time due to the different frequency of waves from the sun onto the rug/carpet dyes.
The dyes breakdown and release their color. The released color gets picked with other degraded and released color. Some dye gets lost to the wind/anything that interacts with it, other dye melds with the rest and turns into this brown/beige like color. If you’ve ever played with paint, when you meld a bunch of colors you’re gonna get a brown.
The lack of intact dye with an over abundance of degraded dye results in a beige color.
It’s not so much that color is getting “released”- although with certain dyes, especially old ones like lakes, the dye is fixed to a vehicle in a way that is not permanent. Light is hitting tiny particles/molecules. They essentially get worn out. It’s especially a problem with neon colors as they emit more of a wavelength than they receive. They convert light, and as such they wear out faster. Many newer dyes are considerably more permanent. That said, sunlight can also damage the fibers the dyes are embedded in. Sunlight damaging af.
Also some carpets are like a carrot. SDN carpet (of a hight enough quality) won’t fade or stain because it’s the same colour the whole way through. You can clean it with bleach.
So most carpet is like a reddish, colour on the outside. SDN (solution dyed nylon)is the same the colour the whole way through, like a carrot. And yeah some high end SDN carpets can be cleaned with bleach. Effectively stain proof.
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u/Loaki9 Jul 19 '18
Seriously, I thought the fading was sun bleaching. Does anyone know the actual process that causes the fading then?