About 01

Most performance fabric is plastic.

Polyester, nylon, elastane — petroleum, spun fine and sold as progress. Here is what it does, in four parts, without the alarm bell.

The Polyester Problem Scroll

The short version

You wouldn’t eat it. You wear it twelve hours a day.

About 95% of performance apparel is made from synthetic fibers. Fewer than 1% of those fabrics are certified chemically clean. Skin is the body's largest organ, and it is not a wall — a good share of what sits on it ends up in it.

95%of performance fabric is synthetic

<1%certified free of harmful chemicals

63%of people now worry about microplastics, BPA and PFAS

The field

What a wash cycle looks like.

A synthetic filament sheds every time it is rubbed, worn or washed. The fragments are too small to filter and too stable to break down. Scroll to swap the filament for ours.

Polyester Sheds microplastic · persistsSupima® + jade + chitin · 95% biodegradable

Filament · section Water

Four parts

What plastic does when you wear it.

None of this is new. It is just rarely said in one place by a company that sells shirts.

It traps heat.

Polyester is an extruded plastic. It does not breathe the way a natural fiber does, so heat and moisture sit against the skin. Chronic heat around the body has been linked to lower testosterone; the dyes used on synthetics do not help.

It sheds microplastics.

Every wear and every wash releases plastic fragments — onto skin, into the air, into the water. A single load of synthetic laundry can release hundreds of thousands of fibers, and water treatment does not catch them all.

It carries chemistry you didn’t choose.

Formaldehyde, BPA, PFAS and synthetic dyes are common in synthetic textiles and their finishes. They can leach, especially with heat and sweat — the two things activewear is for. Your skin takes in a meaningful share of what is on it.

It disrupts hormones, and it never leaves.

Phthalates and other endocrine disruptors found in synthetics are linked to hormone impact, chronic disease and skin irritation. And when you are done with the shirt, it does not break down. It is plastic. It sits in the ground for centuries.

One number each

The problem, measured.

95%

of performance materials use plastic synthetic fiber.

<1%

are certified chemically clean.

60%

of what sits on your skin can be absorbed.

200+ yrs

for a polyester shirt to break down.

What it costs you

Not a crisis. A tax.

We are not here to scare anyone. The polyester problem is not an emergency, it is a slow, daily tax on the body: a little hotter, a little itchier, a little more of something you did not ask for. Paid every day, for decades, by the most active people. It is fixable. That is the only reason to bring it up.

The answer →

The back of a blue HyperNatural tee, outdoors.

We didn’t make this up.

Reuters — “forever chemicals” in activewear

Reporting on PFAS detected in major activewear brands' garments and the regulatory response. Search: Reuters Lululemon forever chemicals.

University of Birmingham — skin absorption of textile chemicals

Research into how flame retardants and plasticizers move from fabric and dust into skin, and the role of sweat and heat in that transfer.

Netflix — “The Plastic Detox”

A documentary account of microplastic exposure in daily life, including from clothing.

Microfiber shedding from synthetic laundry

Peer-reviewed estimates put a single synthetic wash load in the hundreds of thousands of fibers. Wastewater treatment removes most, not all; the remainder enters rivers and oceans.

About · 02

There is a clean alternative.

Performance Without Plastic → What’s inside the fiber