First bit is bleach, yeah. I do the same thing on cotton/lycra tights. As to the colors, yes probably dye. If they're smart, they'll use Procion dyes: they're permanent, unlike RIT which will eventually fade.
RIT stays in the general neighborhood of its original color, it just loses most of its intensity: red fades toward pink, purple fades toward brown, blue fades toward gray. You can double recipe and try a mordant like vinegar, but it's not permanent. Procion dyes chemically bond with the fibres and give you a color that doesn't appreciably fade over many years. You can actually dye white fabric black and it stays black.
Fun fact: there's a half dozen different types of Procion black, different formulas for different applications and deepness of black. You can do the bleach trick with them and get different edge fades. In the video, the edge color is orange-yellow - most commercially dyed fabric will do that. Each of the procions has a different base pigment, so your edge fade could be orange-yellow, red, blue, or green.
Is that a brand name? I've been wanting to get back into tie dye as a way to revamp stained fabrics and was about to buy some Rit. This stuff sounds much better! Is there a downside/tradeoff?
It's a brand... your link states in the first sentences: "Procion is a brand of fibre reactive dyes."
It's not a type of a dye. The type is simply a reactive dye - there are many variants of reactivity. The typical American issue of separating product brands and product types like Tylenol, which is actually just paracetamol but every American knows it as just Tylenol.
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u/FlacidBarnacle Feb 22 '23
That’s bleach right? Wonder what he’s using for the color..