So I had noticed, but thought I was imagining things, that different colors of the same brand and size of string felt quite different. I thought it might be just random batch variation, but from my (admittedly small) sample size, it seems pretty regular! Like OTF neon green seems distinctly softer, fluffier, and a tiny bit bigger than OTF pink. I think I remember some other post about this on this forum, and people thought it was probably ridiculous?
Anyway, I randomly mentioned this to my wife while I was working on a trick. My wife, incidentally, has a PhD in chemistry, is a working chemist, and specializes in photochemistry and dye chemistry. She’s done projects on museum preservation of dyed objects before.
She thought it was completely likely that different dyes would result in different feeling string, because different colors involved different dying agents, which would “very likely” change the physical nature of the string itself. She says in fact it’s less likely to be the dye itself, and more likely to be an additive that is designed to change the nature of the nylon/polyster/etc to make a dye stick. And different colors will involve very different dye molecules, often require very different additives.
She then rolled her eyes and was like, “Jesus, do non-chemists actually think that different colors are like the same chemical and they won’t change the nature of the substrate?”
Anyway, there you go. Random trivial factoid for the day.
