Ayurvastra: How Do our Clothes Affect our Health?

Ayurvedic dye brand TryKind Clothing goes deep into restoring the science of ancient dyes and honoring the need for slow fashion and living.

If someone were to ask you, “What’s in your clothes?”, would you know the answer? Not just the fabric itself but the pesticides and insecticides to grow certain fabrics, as well as the dyes, the fixing agents, and color-fast chemicals added to our clothes during production. The answer for most of us is “No”. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency in the fashion industry has a negative knock-on effect that goes from the environment to garment workers in developing nations, to consumers. We’re unconsciously and unknowingly “wearing” toxic chemicals on the largest organ of our body – our skin.

Fashion retailers across the globe have been caught red-handed using dyes with negative impacts on our health. Many brands simply don’t know what’s in their clothes due to the consistent outsourcing of different parts of the supply chain. Some dyes used in clothes are produced in factories that make industrial parts where cross-contamination is rife. It’s no wonder activist groups are highlighting the issue: Greenpeace wrote a report on “Toxic Threads”, Fashion Revolution asks “#What’s in my Clothes?”, and the Common Objective published that around 60 to 80 percent of all fabric colorants on clothes are AZO dyes, which are not only illegal in the EU but are carcinogenic and release chemicals when the fabric comes into contact with the skin. 

In women, health problems from toxic chemical dyed clothes range from endometriosis to breast cancer, and certain chemicals in dyes, fixers, and fasteners are endocrine disruptors that can affect fertility and be passed onto unborn babies during pregnancy. Yet, women everywhere are blissfully unaware of these effects. This motivated TryKind Clothing founder, Alana Redick, to travel across India to find a solution and spread awareness about women’s health by questioning ladies “What’s in your knickers?”.

“Having worked in the fast fashion industry for several years while practicing Yoga and Ayurveda, it felt like I was leading a double life. I knew the clothes I was working on were made with synthetic fabrics made from petrol and the dyes, well I couldn’t even begin to imagine what was in them!” Alana quit her job and planned to travel the supply chain in India to understand the problem and potential solutions for removing chemicals from our clothes.

From the organic cotton fields of Tamil Nadu to zero-waste packaging in Bangalore to a women’s empowerment sewing center in Rajasthan – there were so many answers to slowing down fashion but no answer to how to dye clothes in a wholesome way without the negative impact on our health. Until a random piece of paper was handed to Alana by an older Tamil lady who had heard her frustrations during a meeting with organic fabric specialists and simply told her, “You should visit here”.