Name: Rehana

Message: Hello,

I have a brown peacoat that I bought from Express way back in 2002.  I still love this coat, but hate the color.  I think peacoats are wool.  

How can I dye it pink? 

The inside of the coat is not wool... it is a smoother silkier material.

Sorry, but this is project is not practical.

Pink is a much lighter color than brown. Since dye is transparent, it cannot make your existing clothing lighter, only darker. The only color you could dye a coat that is a medium or dark brown would be black.

To lighten the color of clothing, you must discharge the existing dye by treating it with a color-removing chemical. This is a chancy procedure and often fails to give good results even on the easiest fabrics to work with, but your fabric is one that is very hard to discharge. There are different discharge chemicals available, starting with ordinary household chlorine bleach, but none will do the job for your brown coat. Chlorine bleach will destroy wool and synthetic fibers, so that's out of the question. In industry, hydrogen peroxide is used to bleach wool (see ProChem's recipe), but the method is unlikely to produce desirable results on already-sewn garments, especially for a novice such as yourself. Rit Color Remover is an excellent product for removing color from cotton, but the heat it requires would almost certainly shrink your wool coat.

Your coat might not even be made of wool. Peacoats can be made with synthetic fibers, as well, such as acrylic. Unfortunately, these synthetics are even more impossible than wool to bleach and dye satisfactorily. The lining of your coat is probably acetate, by the way, a fiber which is quite difficult to dye. 

I'm afraid that your best alternatives are to either decide to accept the coat the way it is, or sell it at a resale shop and find another coat that you like better.

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