How To Make Hypercolor Shirts

It was 1991: "Roseanne was on TV, Terminator 2 was on the big screen, Color Me Badd was on the radio and Hypercolor t-shirts were on the backs of millions of middle- and high schoolhouse-age kids beyond America.

The Hypercolor fad gripped the nation that twelvemonth, thank you to the Seattle-based sportswear company that created them, Generra. In fact, in a brief 3-month bridge, between Feb and May 1991, the visitor sold a whopping $50 million worth of colour-changing, estrus-sensitive T-shirts, shorts, pants, sweatshirts and tights.

Touchable Hypercolor T-shirts in action.

In addition to its colour-morphing absurd cistron, the "mood-ring of the '90s" also had game-changing potential for a young adult chock with hormones. Imagine: Y'all could walk upwardly to your crush in the hallway between classes, take note of the shirt he or she was wearing emblazoned with "Hypercolor," casually place your mitt on him or her, and the warmth of your touch would alter the shirt's color before the eyes of both of you. Let the sparks fly!

Likewise operation equally a flirtation device, Hypercolor was a mysteriously rad technology you could habiliment on your back for nigh $20. But how simple was it?

The "Metamorphic Color System," as Generra cryptically called the manner in which trunk heat (or excessive perspiration, for those unfortunately prone to sweaty armpits) inverse the fabric's colour using thermochromatic pigments as its special sauce. Mental Floss explains that the shirts were dyed twice: kickoff with a permanent dye and again with a thermochromatic dye. The thermochromic dye is usually a mixture of a leuco dye, a weak acid, and common salt. (Leuco dye is as well used on the side of a Duracell battery to run across if it'south still charged or on food packaging to judge temperature.)

When the shirt heated up or cooled downwardly, the molecules in the dye changed shape and shifted from arresting calorie-free to releasing it, making the color transform, as if by magic!

Sadly, though, after a handful of washes, or one laundering misstep in too-hot h2o, the magic powers faded and the shirt froze permanently into a purple-brown mushy color.

Merely that wasn't Hypercolor'southward only misfortune. As a result of mismanagement and overproduction, Generra couldn't handle its overnight success and declared bankruptcy only a year later, in 1992. An commodity in the Seattle Times in 1992, Generra: Hot Start, Then Cold Reality—Company Reflects Industry's Woes, recounts visitor main Steven Miska saying, "We tried to brand too much production available in too brusk a catamenia of time." If he could do information technology once again, Miska said, he would accept limited distribution, "which would have washed a lot to prolong the life of the product."

Hypercolor went the mode of Color Me Badd: from Casey Kasem's Peak 40 to a 1-hitting wonder.

Attempts to reinvigorate the make, the concept or the lifestyle—if you lot were a existent Hypercolor fanatic—never quite gained the momentum of the initial early '90s fad. Around 2008, Puma, American Apparel and other indie designers dipped their toes into the color-changing concept with sneakers, T-shirts and scarves, just the "special effects garments" as Trunk Faders calls current-24-hour interval Hypercolor have nowhere near the cachet they had a couple decades agone.