It is important to watch out for fake silk or blended silk. Real silk is the queen of fabrics, but with that high quality comes a higher price, and so people are always trying to use all sorts of strategies to trick you into buying various kinds of fake silk or blended silk. Nowadays with modern technologies, fake silk can be produced to be very similar to real silk, it’s hard to indicate just by feeling the texture with untrained eye.

Unfortunately, unlike in life, you can’t fake it till you make it with real silk. While you can’t always tell for certain just from appearance or texture if it’s real silk, there are a few tricks you can use to tell if something is 100% real silk.  

Pure Silk will have fully dissolved in bleach within a few minutes. It’s the most straightforward way to test because even silk blended won’t dissolve in bleach. Grab a tiny bit of silk fiber, we suggest it no bigger than 5mm*5mm, as bigger size takes long time to dissolve. Throw silk fiber into a cup of bleach and let it soak at least 15 minutes, stir if necessary. You can find the fiber get smaller or disappear in bleach. If the fiber get smaller but not totally gone, add more bleach and stay for longer time. If the fiber has no change or not totally gone in bleach, the fiber is not pure silk.

Real silk will slowly burn while exposed to the flame, won’t catch fire, will smell like burning hair while touching the flame, but will stop burning almost immediately when the flame is removed. Fake silk, on the other hand, will melt into beads, smell like burning plastic, and can also catch fire, continuing to burn when you remove the flame!

How to test real silk? I don’t want to ruin my silk pillowcase.

If you want to find out if your silk pillowcase is made of real pure silk or fake silk/blended silk, you could get a small piece of material to test. You don’t have to cut a piece from your silk pillowcase for testing, your beautiful silk pillowcase might be ruined. To prevent ruining your silk products for testing, here’re some tips from SPOIL ME:

• Get a free silk sample if you order any other silk products from SPOIL ME. Add a silk sample to your cart with your other items and check out with code FREESILKSAMPLE1, you’ll get a silk material sample for free and posted together with other items you ordered. Feel free to test real silk material, don’t worry to damage your beautiful silk products any more!
• Grab some silk fiber from the internal of your silk pillowcase instead of cutting it, but make sure the fibers are not from sewing thread or piping edge(they are not silk).

What are the tips to test real silk with bleach?

If your silk is not melted in bleach successfully, check carefully to see if you tested properly:

• Plenty bleach. Let silk soak in plenty bleach instead of patching or dropping bleach to silk.
• Time. Silk won’t disappear immediately in bleach, you need to wait around 10-30 minutes, it depends on the size of silk material.
• Size of silk sample. The bigger the silk material you use , the longer time you need for testing, we recommend the sample you test is no more than 5*5mm.
• Bleach is corrosive and can cause irritation if it comes into contact with the skin, eyes or airways. Make sure you wear rubber gloves, goggles and do not breath in product fumes. Never mix with other materials especially ammonia or other cleaner.

 SPOIL ME SILK PILLOWCASE & SILK PRODUCTS