The Quest To Wear Nature’s True Colors

The holy grail

Before going synthetic, dyeing clothes was like alchemy: it involved heating a cauldron of water, dye, fabric, and fixatives (often vinegar or urine) to bind pigments to the cloth. With a strong stomach and a bit of luck, earthy colors could be achieved using commonly available plants and minerals. However, alchemists were especially fixated on creating vibrant and unusual dyes. Their few successful concoctions required iconic and bizarre ingredients.

Tyrian purple, the color of royalty, was made from the mucus of sea snails. Carmine red comes from tiny insects selectively bred by Aztec and Mayan people for thousands of years; after the Spanish invasion, it was traded globally in high demand. As the legend goes, Prussian blue was created by accident when a batch of carmine was contaminated with blood. These colors funded empires and were once worth more than their weight in gold.

While we no longer extract natural dyes in such quantities, the industrial dyeing process is no less harmful. Most of today’s dyes and fixatives are chemically synthesized from petroleum, then dumped into waterways. To combat these issues, companies like Achroma are returning to making tans, greens, and yellows from botanical sources, as well as using recycled clothing to dye new batches. And despite the colorful history of dyes, black is the color in highest demand today. In response, Nature Coatings is turning discarded wood into carbon black.

But eventually, we encounter the same problem that alchemists once faced as they tried and failed to create reds, purples, and blues: where could these colors come from?

Dyeing with bacteria

In the field of synthetic biology, they come from bacteria. Based in the UK, Colorifix is one startup that wants to replace cauldrons with fermentors, where bacteria are grown to concentrate chemicals, synthesize pigments, and fix them into fabric. This means that color could come from the most unimaginable of places — like the red-green eyes of a fruit fly. Instead of farming innumerable fruit flies and poking out their eyes, companies like Colorifix aim to use bacteria to bring these colors to scale. They’re genetically engineering microbes to tap into the invisible palette of natural pigments, with the potential to be less harmful to the environment.

To learn more, I caught up with Colorifix CEO and co-founder, Orr Yarkoni, who’s also one of the speakers and sponsors for our upcoming conference. “We’ve developed microorganisms that produce, deposit, and fixe dyes directly onto textiles, changing not just how dyes are made, but how they’re applied,” he explains. “Doing things with biology means we can replace a lot of chemistry, reduce water and electricity inputs, and ultimately lower carbon emissions for this highly impactful industry.”

Using bacteria as small chemical factories begins with a comprehensive literature review and data analysis of pigments that exist in nature. For example, because fruit flies are one of the most studied model organisms, scientists have already characterized which genes map to different colors, allowing companies like Colorifix to use this data to source this pigment at scale. When a company orders a particular color, Colorifix attempts to find enzymes that can catalyze a specific reaction to achieve the desired pigment, then search databases for possible DNA sequences of this enzyme. They produce many different constructs and select three of varying intensity: strong, medium, and weak. This information is fed back into an AI model that predicts color from the DNA sequences of various organisms.

However, it’s also critical to understand the underlying chemistry itself. Parameters that may not have been included in the training data, such as the water source or growth media, can dramatically change the resulting colors. In addition, each fabric has a unique chemical composition; therefore, the same process can create different colors on different textiles. For example, one bacterial strain can result in pink nylon and gray cotton. The culprit is a difference in surface chemistry, affecting binding orientation, bond energy, and the way light bounces off. Few colors can be reliably reproduced across batches, so most pigments fail quality controls and rarely reach the market.

Utilizing synthetic biology is new territory, and catching up to 150 years of development of standard fabric dyes requires rigorous and comprehensive metrics. Colorifix puts its products through a battery of tests for lightfastness, rub fastness, wash fastness, sweat, allergenicity, and more to ensure that the products are safe for human health and the environment. Just because something is made “naturally” does not mean it is inherently non-toxic, sustainable, or even “better” — until this is tested and experimentally validated. A sustainably dyed shirt that washes out after one wear is still worse for the environment than a traditionally dyed shirt, which is why during testing, Colorifix ensures that their products meet or exceed products dyed using the traditional method.

Mihails Delmans, the head of informatics at Colorifix, describes the company as one that sells data that “represents the real physical world in the most clear way.” Artificial intelligence has the potential to grasp properties that humans cannot understand, which is particularly helpful in predicting the outcome. As more data becomes available, the process scales and improves naturally, representing information that is increasingly relevant to consumers.

Breaking into fashion

However, this long-term plan hinges on the fashion industry’s willingness to use genetically modified bacteria in the first place — and brands are being more receptive than expected.

As Dr. Yarkoni recounts,

I thought that there would be a lot of hesitancy, a lot of ums and ahs from fashion brands, but we’ve probably spoken to over 120 brands now to date. We had one brand that outright said GM isn’t for us…and another brand that was kind of hesitant but said, let’s go anyway. The one that wasn’t interested three months later came back and said, “We’d like to talk to you again because we’re rethinking it, and what you’re doing makes sense.”

These partnerships are paying off. Last year, Colorifix raised £18 million after a Series B funding round led by H&M’s group investment arm, CO:LAB. In the synbio textile dyeing space, Colorifix is joined by other startups such as PILI (France), Huue (America), Werewool (America), Octarine Bio (Denmark), and Vienna Textile Lab (Austria). However, Colorifix is distinguished by its past product launches.

In 2021, Colorifix produced a two-toned shirt in H&M’s Color Story Collection. This was inspired by the bright colors found in some geysers, which are caused by bacteria that live in the water. Their color changes based on the surrounding salinity and pH. The same pigment, indigoidine, was also used to dye the light beige and pink colors of the H&M shirt. However, the bacteria that color hot springs thrive under extreme temperatures, so researchers at Colorifix borrowed the chemical synthesis pathway from another organism better suited for the textile-dying environment.

Later that year, PANGIA also introduced a limited-edition collection with Colorifix. Sweatshirts and sweatpants were available in two colors: pastel pink, which is indigoidine, and pale blue, which comes from a pigment in the silk production process.

While those items are no longer available, you might not have to wait long to own an article of Colorifix-dyed clothing. They have passed the rigorous testing stage, and are now working to fill their first large-scale order.

This means navigating contracts with fashion brands and working with policymakers to expand legislation around the use of genetically modified bacteria. While companies may be quick to try new technology, the legislative side is slow to catch up. It can take weeks or months to hear back about an application. Other times, part or all of the law is missing. For instance, Colorifix had to correspond with India’s GMO council to allow the import of GMOs such as their strains. Again, it’s key for them to engage, this time with regulators, to communicate what they are doing and why.

Pay attention, Pantone

How does Colorifix successfully work with clients and governing bodies? Apart from being on the scientific frontier, they are also pushing what business models could look like for successful biotech companies. Engineering bacteria is the focus of their research efforts, but it’s not the component that is monetized.

Crucially, Colorifix won’t patent or sell their organisms. If a client purchases growth media and hardware from Colorifix, they’ll gain access to all the colors and strains for free. Since their dye compounds are naturally occurring, a patent on them could also be challenged — after all, nobody should own nature. Instead of licensing each individual product, Colorifix has opted to patent its overall dyeing process. To Dr. Yarkoni, this decision was clear-cut:

The key is to focus on what matters, and for us, it’s really that people use the technology. If we went down the route of patenting each individual color and each customer over each color, just think of the paperwork and the auditing that we need to do….We tried to make it as simple, easy to understand, and transparent as we could whilst keeping the business going.

From developing genetically engineered microbes to refusing to monetize them, Colorifix is disrupting the fabric dyeing industry on many fronts.

Thank you to Davian Ho and Farrah Kaiyom for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Colorifix, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference. For more content, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter and follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.