It’s almost an unsettling sensation to touch bamboo pajamas for the first time. The feel of the fabric is slippery and cool in a way that doesn’t quite fit the expectations most people have of fabric designed to be used as sleepwear. It doesn’t have the soft-but-textured feel of a well-worn piece of cotton. It’s definitely not the slightly sterile feel of polyester. There’s something nearly liquid about the sensation instead.
So how can something that’s literally a type of grass feel like a liquid when it touches your skin? Bamboo is the plant that pandas eat, after all. The answer is a combination of some really interesting chemistry and a manufacturing process that changes the plant material in ways that people don’t usually expect.
What Happens to Bamboo Before It Becomes Fabric?
The process of converting bamboo into something that can be used as pajama fabric isn’t just as simple as harvesting the stalks and then weaving them like any other fibrous plant material. That’s the fantasy version of events. In reality, the bamboo that becomes pajama fabric goes through a process called regeneration.
Regenerating bamboo fabric, better known as bamboo viscose, starts as a stalky plant and gets processed into something that’s viscous. The stalks are crushed down and dissolved in chemical (often sodium hydroxide) based solutions that produce a solution that’s thick and syrupy and almost like honey. It’s extruded into uniform strands to create bamboo viscose fabric.
If you’re concerned with environmental issues, and who isn’t these days? You might find the details of this process a little concerning. And in many ways, yes, it is an intense process. It’s not as straightforward and innocent as some forms of advertising like to portray. However, it’s also an order of magnitude less resource intensive than growing, processing, and harvesting cotton (which requires massive amounts of water and pesticides). So that’s not the point of interest here.
This is the reason why the final product feels so different, however, from other natural fabric options like cotton or linen. The regeneration process that the bamboo goes through means that the fibres have a very different structure from more familiar natural materials.
The Microstructural Difference You Can Feel
Cotton fibres on a microscopic level are rough and twisted, almost like tiny ropes. There’s no real structure to them, which provides an interesting natural texture when you rub them against your fingers. Bamboo viscose also has a recognizable fibre structure, but it’s one that’s very different from the tiny twisted “ropes” of cotton.
Bamboo viscose fibres are long, uniform, and they don’t have any rough patches at all. Each segment is a perfect representation of whatever the fibre technicians or producers intend for the fibre to look like when its final length is obtained.
Why does this matter? Because on a tiny scale (even scales that you cannot easily or consciously visualize), your skin feels fibres. When they rub against your skin, the little imperfections on a microscopic level of the fibres create friction between your skin and the fabric. The feeling of soft cotton isn’t quite scratchy but it’s definitely a feeling that you can sense, your mind picks up this tiny but powerful signal.
This doesn’t happen with bamboo viscose fabric. There’s practically zero friction.
Voila: That Slippery Feel
So that distinctive feeling of coolness and slipperiness when you touch bamboo viscose fabric isn’t just good advertising, it’s physics and fibre structure working together.
Another component of this “slipperiness”? Bamboo viscose drapes extremely well compared to cotton. Most people notice this before they even consciously think about it. Bamboo pajamas naturally have a certain weight to them and they flow in a way that feels almost liquid as they hang off your body.
In terms of sleepwear, it’s easy to see how this drapage may be beneficial. Pajamas by This is J (and many other manufacturers) have become astonishingly popular because they make sleeping especially pleasurable.
Drape has a technical definition. It refers to how a piece of clothing behaves when it comes in contact with a person’s body. Specifically, it means that the fabric item doesn’t tent away from the person’s body in strange ways. Instead, it lies flat next to its wearer, without bunching or appearing uneven. It just looks and feels good.
Bamboo Viscose is Great at This
It’s one of the main things that make bamboo pajamas so crazy comfortable to wear while sleeping. The material sleeps extremely well because it can easily move with your body rather than working against it.
Good drape in a clothing item does other things that are less obvious.
Another unidentified, yet very tangible, property? Bamboo viscose also feels cooler as it adapts to the temperature of its wearer over time.
One thing that many people feel but don’t often think about? Bamboo viscose stays in contact with the body after a number of washes. It’s rare for this fabric to lose the contact between the fibre material of the fabric itself and the body of the person wearing it.
This closeness is an effective property when it comes to thermoregulation, helping the human body stay at an effective temperature while sleeping.
Bamboo Viscose Stays Close
It’s one of the reasons why other natural fibres (and even synthetic ones) can create mini hot spots on different sections of the body after being worn or washed several times.
Lesser-quality fabric items may easily fail to hold in these properties because they may be manufactured using shorter lengths of fibre or even use a less-fancy version of the viscose process when it comes to fabric used by manufacturers to create clothing items.
These “gap forming tendencies” can easily cause problems during the sleep cycle! The body sometimes reacts to these gaps by trying to self-regulate and even overcome these tiny challenges to its thermoregulation!
High-Quality Bamboo Fibres
High-quality bamboo viscose has longer fibres, better controls put in place during its manufacturing processes. And simple testing methods before the fabrics get released into public markets for fabric manufacturers to use to make clothing items.
Higher quality fabric items can feature much different weights.
Heavier weigh fabrics can feel effective at preventing thermal conductivity through the item itself while lighter items sometimes don’t feel adequate to provide good thermal conductivity if made into weighted pajama coverings.
Another surprise? Bamboo pajamas can be treated much differently than their cotton cousins.
Take Care of Your Pajamas
If you toss your bamboo pajamas into a hot wash with regular detergent (and maybe even a little fabric softener), you’ll destroy any properties that make them feel special and keep them feeling exceptionally good even after you’ve worn them for years.
High quality bamboo viscose fibres are more delicate than cotton. High temperatures change their structure over time, turning their fibres into rough-feeling objects rather than staying silky feeling when they first make contact with your skin.
Ironically, fabric softener can also coat (and not truly soften) the delicate fibres in problematic ways.
So, what do the manufacturers suggest?
Washing your bamboo pajamas in cold water and using less, not more, fabric softener for each wash cycle.
This doesn’t mean that silky-feeling fabric will feel ruined quickly as long as it isn’t mistreated in any way. If you take care of it, it will still last for many years. But it won’t last as long as a regular cotton pajama item if you treat both items equally.
Seduction and Safety
For too many people, the sensory experience of bedtime-related garments focuses on the need for high levels of comfort. However, another aspect of the sensation of bed-related clothing items relates to sleep quality more than people expect.
One lesser-known, but very important, factor in sleep quality? The tactile experience of sleepwear plays an important role in helping humans sleep well.
Every night when you switch off your light and spend hours attempting to fall asleep, your mind and body get countless stimuli related to temperature, humidity levels and efficiency-related factors.
One means by which sleeping in specific types of clothing may lead to insomnia is if they keep sending signals to your mind warning it of non-efficient conditions during it’s process of hibernation instead of encouraging it to fall into deeper states of sleep.
This includes a lot of moisture when it makes contact with certain types of fabric, such as high-end bamboo pajamas. That’s where those differences between bamboo and other napping fabrics come into play.
The tactile experience created by using bamboo fabric won’t guarantee amazing sleep quality every night. But there’s a reason why people who switch from traditional sleepwear (even those made from cotton) to bamboo regularly report improved sleep quality overall.
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