4 min read
What spunlace actually is
How a loose fibre web becomes a towel with nothing but high-pressure water, and what the absence of a binder changes in use.
Spunlace — hydroentanglement — is the process of bonding a web of staple fibres with high-pressure water. Nothing is added to make the fibres adhere. The water does the work, and that single fact explains most of what a spunlace towel does well, and what it cannot do at all.
Before the water arrives
The web begins as fibre: opened, blended, then carded into a fleece in which the fibres lie roughly parallel. A carded fleece has almost no strength of its own; it holds together by friction. At this stage the two variables that will follow the product all the way to the customer are already fixed — the fibre blend and the basis weight. Everything downstream can adjust how the towel behaves, but it cannot change what the web is made of.
What the jets do
The fleece passes under rows of nozzles, usually supported on a screen or a drum. Each jet drives surface fibres down through the thickness of the web, and those fibres wrap around their neighbours on the way. Repeat that several thousand times per metre and the structure is mechanically locked.
The screen also leaves its own mark. Perforations, ribs and mesh patterns are transferred into the web, which is why a patterned spunlace towel keeps its texture through use — it is a shape, not an ink.
Why the absence of a binder is noticeable
A binder works by gluing fibres at the points where they cross. It is a fast and inexpensive way to build a web, and it leaves a thin polymer film distributed through the material. That film is the reason some nonwovens feel slightly stiff as they dry, and faintly tacky when wet.
A hydroentangled web holds itself together by entanglement instead. Fibre ends are wrapped into the structure rather than fixed in place, so the towel stays soft through a drying cycle and leaves no film where it has been pressed against skin. On a facial towel, or on anything that touches a client’s face, that is the difference that is felt rather than measured.
Three questions worth asking a supplier
Is the web bonded by water or by a binder? What is the basis weight? And which test method produced the absorbency figure on the data sheet?
The third question is the one that usually gets skipped, and it is the one that makes two data sheets comparable at all.