A new insight into comfort factor for wool-evoked prickle

摘要

One of the key barriers at retail for wool is this perception of wool being prickly and uncomfortable. In the past, woolgrowers have had a test called "comfort factor" which derived as part of the testing for micron, which is the proportion of wool fibers that are courser than 30 microns. It appears that is not the case. Through axial bending testing of standard wool top fibers, cashmere fibers and alpaca fibers, we find out that the sort of keratin fiber is contributed to that "comfort factor" at the retail end exactly, as different sorts of keratin fibers have different equivalent bending modulus.