Name: John

Message: Hi I am trying to find out if it is possible to dye over gray clothing. I found the question but you only answered about if the clothing was black. I am planning to be the Joker this Halloween and finding pinstripe pants to dye purple has been a real pain. I wish I had read this website before because I recently tried to dye black 65% polyester pants with RIT purple dye and it came out still black unfortunately. These are the pants I plan to purchase and dye with RIT Purple dye. They are 49% Cotton, 34% Polyester, and 17% rayon.

Don't buy those pants if all you want to do is dye them. Buy dyeable pants instead. And don't use Rit dye, as it will not work at all on polyester and, to work well even on cotton, it requires that you simmer it with your clothing in a large cooking pot; using a cool water dye such as Procion dye on 100% cotton will allow you to use a cheap plastic bucket instead. Dyeing polyester requires a special kind of hot water dye called disperse dye; polyester cannot be dyed with all-purpose dyes such as Rit, nor with any other dye that works on natural fibers.

Instead of finding inappropriate-for-dyeing trousers and trying to dye them, you need to find some dyeable white trousers and dye those. The results will be far better.

The important point here is that dye is transparent. The color you start with will show through any color of dye! If you want to dye something to be purple, you can't start with a dark color such as charcoal gray. The best you will end up with, if you do, is a slightly purplish dark gray, which won't work for a Joker costume at all. You MUST start out with a light color, if you want to end up with an obvious purple. You can start with a light blue or pink, that's fine, since those colors can be mixed into purple (pink plus blue equals purple), but you can't start with any color that is dark. White is always best for any clothing you want to dye to a bright color.

To get a feel for this, get yourself some colored paper and some watercolor paint. Try using purple paint on top of white paper, on top of pink paper, and on top of gray paper. You will see that adding purple to gray gives dull, dark, and far less vivid results than adding purple to a light color. It's fine to overdye gray trousers if you want a subtle purplish gray, but it's no good at all if what you want is a bright purple. A paler gray, such as the "Gray Plaid" version of your Old Navy pants, will show color better, though not quite as well as some white cotton pants would. Also note that you cannot get a solid color by dyeing any sort of plaid or herringbone design; the design will still show through after dyeing. If you want to end up with a solid color, you must start with a solid color, preferably white. If you start with a pinstripe design, the stripes should still show through, even if only faintly, after you dye it, or you can add a pinstripe afterwards to a solid color with fabric paint, if you have a very steady hand for straight lines.

The fiber content is very important, too. You must match your dye choice to the fiber your clothing is made of. If you had some white or light pink pants that were made of 49% Cotton, 34% Polyester, and 17% rayon, you'd have a total of 66% dyeable fiber there. The 34% of the fiber that is polyester will stay the original color, because it won't take any ordinary dye. That means that your purple will end up only 66% as dark as the color you are trying to reach, if you're dyeing white material, since only 66% of the fiber in the pants will take the dye. You can dye both of the fibers in some white cotton/polyester blend pants by boiling them (in a five-gallon stainless steel pot that you do not intend to use for cooking food again) for at least half an hour at a high boil with "iDye Poly" for polyester fiber mixed with "iDye" for cotton and rayon, but these dyes can be purchased by mail-order only, and they are not as long-lasting and unfading as fiber reactive dyes used on 100% cotton or rayon. Polyester is a pain to dye and will not take color from dyes that work on natural fibers. Don't even try to use all-purpose dye, such as Rit dye.

Dharma Trading Company sells a great many different kinds of clothing that are white and prepared for dyeing, and also made of easily dyeable fibers. These are the best sort of thing to start with. They do not have any dress trousers, but they do have scrub pants which dye up great and are inexpensive, besides. See their section on "Men's Shorts and Pants". These cotton pants can be dyed with Procion cool water fiber reactive dyes, so you can dye them at room temperature in a plastic bucket, instead of requiring a very large stainless steel dyeing pot as you do with all hot water dyes. Procion dyes are better than Rit, and much easier to apply since they do not require heat. Dharma is a good place to buy good Procion dyes.

Amazon sells some 100% cotton men's pants in white which should be much more suitable than your earlier choice for dyeing, since they are white, 100% cotton, and apparently not treated with a permanent press or stain-resistant finish, which will repel dye. The price is much higher than Dharma's, at $50, but the style is closer to what you had in mind, with beltloops. Good results are not as certain as with the Dharma PFD clothing, but far more likely than with the Old Navy pants you were looking at. See the following link:
white cotton men's trousers at Amazon

If you buy the Old Navy pants that are grey and 49% Cotton, 34% Polyester, and 17% rayon, you MIGHT be able to remove some of their color with Rit Color Remover or Jacquard Color Remover. If this works, so that the original color becomes much lighter, then the dye will show up much better. Both of these color remover chemicals require hot water to work, and they work better at 180°F, on the stovetop, than in the hot tap water that is all you have available to you in a washing machine. However, the ease of using a washing machine is so much greater that it's worth trying first. 

Be sure to buy the pants on the large side, since the hot water you're going to be using might shrink them. There is absolutely no guarantee that any color removing product will work on any particular garment you buy. Sometimes the manufacturers use a dye that can be removed or lightened in color, and sometimes they don't, but there is no way to tell before you try it. You will not be able to return the pants to the store if you try Rit Color Remover or dye on them but find that it does not work, so there's a risk here. Whatever you do,don't use bleach on these pants! Bleach causes an unsightly permanent yellow stain on polyester. Rit Color Remover works differently and is much safer for your synthetic-fiber clothing. Still, no guarantees. Your pants may be just as dark and undyeable after you use the color remover, depending on what kind of dye it was originally colored with. It may very well end up costing less, in money, time, and trouble, to just buy some appropriate purple pants from a costumer's shop. 'The Joker' is an extremely popular costume idea this year, judging from my mail, and there are costumes commercially available in a wide range of prices and quality.

One last option to consider is pigment dyeing, in which you use a thin fabric paint (such as Dye-na-Flow or Dharma Pigment Dyes) to color your fabric instead of dye. The advantages are that boiling is not required, and that the paint will color both natural and synthetic fibers at the same time. Unfortunately, you can't get a perfectly smooth solid color with pigment dyeing, so it will not give quite the effect you're after for your Joker's pinstriped purple pants.

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