Why Sublimation Ink Only Work On Lighter Colored Materials

The sublimation inks are designed to bond to any polymer coated material, and will NOT bond to cotton surfaces. There are polymer sprays available that allow sublimations inks to work with cotton t-shirts, but they typically work best on shirts that are a mix of polyester and cotton.Sublimations inks generally do not transfer well to darker type materials. Sublimation inks use dye to permeate the material and typically transfer better to lighter colored materials.

Printing on dark fabrics successfully and easily is probably one of the holy grails of garment decoration, and decorators are always searching for new solutions. One of the questions we get asked quite often is whether or not sublimation can be done on dark fabrics.

Since sublimation has a lower cost for entry than other forms of printing, many people are eager to sublimate on light and dark fabrics but, as of right now, it doesn’t work that way. Sublimation can only be done on light colored polyester fabrics or poly coated items.

There are two reasons that dye sublimation ink doesn’t work on dark colors. The first is that sublimation ink dyes the fibers of the garment. Sublimation is a process by which a solid turns into a gas without going through a liquid state. Through the use of heat, the gas bonds with the fibers of the garment, or the poly fibers in the coating on the sublimation blank, and dyes those fibers.

There is no coating and no underbase, the ink literally dyes the fibers and becomes part of the fabric. Using this process on darker fabrics doesn’t work because, although you can dye the darker fabrics with the ink, you won’t be able to see the resulting design.

The second reason that dye sublimation ink won’t work with dark colors is the lack of a white underbase to make the colors stand out. Any type of printing that is even moderately successful with dark colors, whether it’s screenprint or direct to garment printing,

requires laying down an underbase of white before the colors are applied. Sublimation ink only works on polyester, so laying down an undercoat of white would require something that had polyester fibers in it, which may not even be possible when it comes to ink.

Currently, because sublimation printing only works with lighter colors, dye sublimation ink only works on lighter colored materials.