Effects of Mordant Treatment on Wool Fibers Colored by Maillard Reaction

Abstract

It was reported in our previous papers that reactions of wool fibers with various reducing sugars,such as xylose, glucose, and maltose, gave their fibers yellowish or brownish coloration. These coloration reactions are well known as Maillard reaction in the food chemistry. However, it was also clarified there that the colored wool fibers showed the worst color fastness results to light, similar to fibers dyed by natural dyestuffs. In this paper, the wool fibers colored by the Maillard reaction were also mordanted by the same techniques of natural dyestuffs using the following three cationic ions; Al³⁺, Cu²⁺, and Fe²⁺, where the effects of these mordant processing both to their color fastness results and to their color changes were investigated in detail. As a result, the wool fibers mordanted by CuSO₄ afforded their excellent color fastness to light (grade 4 at the blue scale of JIS L 0843 (color fastness to Xe arc lamp light)), and the color of these fibers became darker than one of the fibers colored only by the Maillard reaction.