As patrons return to hotels, spas and gyms around the world, increased interest in sustainability and health and wellbeing are driving demand for premium towels.
A plush towel, spotlessly clean and soft to the touch, has always been an important part of the guest experience. Towels and bathrobes need to be fresh and fluffy and to look like new every time they are laundered. What’s more, the modern hotel guest or gym patron wants this luxury to be eco-friendly.
As a company that serves the world’s top towel brands, Huntsman Textile Effects has the solutions and expertise to help mills satisfy the growing market for premium hotel-quality towels.
Super soft and absorbent
Huntsman’s ULTRATEX® range of hydrophilic silicone softeners enable mills to produce towels that are very soft to the touch and yet won’t look droopy. Huntsman customizes the ULTRATEX® recipes to ensure a very soft finish and full handle, balanced against optimal absorbency. These softeners are highly effective at low doses and shear-stable, with good mechanical stability. They are suitable for continuous application, with formulations for exhaust processes also available.
Fluffy and luxurious
Huntsman’s SAPAMINE® KL family of softening agents have excellent hydrophilic properties and can help mills produce luxury towels that are warm, soft and absorbent, with natural bounce and bulk. The SAPAMINE ® softeners are shear-stable and low-foaming for more efficient and effective application.
Wash durability and fresh smelling
Sciessent’s Agion® technology is applied for towels that smell fresh for longer. This industry-leading solution inhibits microbial growth to control odor, delivering long-lasting protection by releasing its active antimicrobial agents only when needed for unprecedented wash durability. Furthermore, Agion® will not adversely affect shade, fastness or absorbency and it can be built-in or applied via the exhaust method to any textile in combination with other functional finishes, dyes, inks, and pre-treatments, including softeners.
Eco-friendly
The AVITERA® SE dyes are well-known for offering unrivalled environmental savings. With high-speed, low-temperature wash off, water and energy savings of up to 50% are possible, along with higher productivity due to faster processing. The AVITERA® SE dyes can be combined with the INVAZYME® SOFT pretreatment process for further savings of time, water and energy.
INVAZYME® SOFT is a biological catalyst that rapidly scours natural cellulosic fibers and blends at a low temperature and pH. It not only preserves the natural hand feel and bulkiness of the fabric and significantly reduces weight loss during processing, but also leads to savings in waste water treatment.
Bright whites
High IQ® Lasting White delivers very high and brilliant whites. Powered by the unique UVITEX® range of fluorescent whitening technologies and backed by decades of application know-how and superior technical support, Lasting White offers unequalled acid stability and acid fastness and excellent protection against phenolic yellowing during storage or shipment. Lasting White is also eco-friendly due to its high exhaustion rates and aniline-free chemistry.
Spotless and long-lasting
A combination of AVITERA® SE and NOVACRON® EC reactive dyes is recommended for towels with intense long-lasting colors.
The revolutionary AVITERA® SE dyes deliver high wash-fastness, with high chlorine resistance and high light-fastness, and make substantial water and energy savings possible. Combining them with NOVACRON® EC enhances the towel’s perspiration-fastness and chlorine resistance and helps prevent spotting due to chemicals in cosmetics, like Benzoyl Peroxide. Both Huntsman dyes also offer outstanding compatibility, excellent reproducibility and easy washing-off.
Bleach safe
NOVASOL® vat dyes are used to produce towels that keep their bright colors even when bleached for hygiene purposes. Covering the full shade spectrum, these dyes retain their intensity wash after wash. In addition to high chlorine-fastness, they provide good all-round wet fastness and outstanding lightfastness. Plus, NOVASOL® dyes are easy to apply, due to their good dispersion behavior and build up.
Adding value with hotel-quality towel production
The ability to produce hotel-quality towels to international standard adds value for textile mills. Premium towels and bathrobes need to look good and perform well through heavy use and frequent laundering, and to provide sustainability to meet the needs of eco-conscious guests. Innovative dyes and textile effects technologies from Huntsman make this possible today.
Anish Paliwal, Global Marketing Manager – CEL & DA, Huntsman Textile Effects