And is it the same reason that it keeps us cool in the Summer?
Have you ever wondered just why wool keeps us warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer? Neither had I until I recently developed an interest in real wool and its use in clothing.
Earlier this year, I posted about my highly scientific* experiment into whether or not wearing woollen clothes keeps you cooler in the hot weather and (spoiler alert) yes it did!
*Not scientific at all
So the obvious thing to do next is to look at wool as an insulator. Yes? Yes.
And it turns out that the thing that allows wool to keep you cooler is also the same thing that helps it to keep you warmer in the Winter and that is its structure.
Unlike synthetic yarns, which are very smooth under the microscope, wool is anything but smooth – it has overlapping ridges all along its surface which creates pores and allows it to trap air. It has even been found that wool can generate heat of its own, using its structure and chemical makeup.
This by itself wouldn’t make wool the renowned insulator it is, however.
Wool is very bad at conducting heat. This means that the heat from your body gets trapped there and helps to keep you warm in the Winter. In the Summer, it does the opposite and traps the hot air from the outside and stops it from getting through to your skin.
It is also these pores in the structure, as well as its actual chemical structure, that allows wool to be naturally water-resistant – the water is trapped in these spaces, stopping it from reaching your skin. Some of this water then evaporates off due to the wool’s generation of heat, but also because the liquid reacts with the hydrogen within the wool.
There is a lot more science to this if you are keen to look into it further, but that is not my intent here.
I am just learning about the wonders of wool and wanted to share them with you along the way – I hope you enjoy them as much as I do!
