Will color remover enable a red costume to be dyed green?

Name: Christie

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Message: I went through your list and before I sink money into color remover I just wanted to ask you if you think this would be possible. Red cotton jumpsuit to be turned into army green in color. My tween wants to be a Top Gun Pilot for Halloween and honestly trying to find a costume to fit his "growing one way and not the other" stage is more than I can handle this year. Thanks for any help.

It's never possible to predict with 100% certainty whether a particular garment will allow its color to be removed, since we can't find out what dye was used by the manufacturer. Color removers often work, but not always.

I think it's worth a try. Even if you lighten the color only halfway, that should be enough to be able to dye it a dull olive green. Combining the original red color with a bright green dye will produce a brownish color, but a lighter red plus bright green dye will make olive green.

Note that color removers, such as Rit Color Remover, are easier to use in the washing machine, with hot water, but hotter water works better still. It works best if you heat the garment with the color remover in a large cooking pot on top of the stove. For a compromise, you can heat water to boiling and pour it into your washing machine, to get the water hotter than your water heater can supply to the washer.

Chlorine bleach sometimes works when color remover doesn't, and does not require hot water, but it's important to wash any garment thoroughly in between these two treatments. Don't mix color remover with bleach.

If the Color Remover and bleach (used separately) both completely fail to remove the red color, then what you should do is dye the jumpsuit black. You can overdye any color to black, if the material is dyeable. A black jumpsuit might work for the pilot costume; if not, there are a lot of other costume ideas that work with a black jumpsuit.

A word of warning: color remover may remove the color from the polyester thread at the seams, that the jumpsuit is sewn together with, but dye itself will not change the color of the thread. Polyester thread does not accept the color of any dye that will work on cotton, so the thread stays the original color. Whether this is a problem or not depends on the style of the garment you're dyeing.

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Posted: Monday - October 04, 2010 at 09:21 AM

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Will color remover enable a red costume to be dyed green?

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