Scientists Create Purple Fabric That Can Keep You Cooler Than White Cotton

Photo: Adelaide University

It’s been scientifically proven that wearing white on a hot summer day can help keep you cool. Darker and more colorful clothing absorb more sunlight, while white reflects it. But scientists have now developed a purple fabric that challenges this conventional wisdom—and could eventually help people stay cool without sacrificing color.

The new textile uses passive radiative cooling, a process that allows a material to reflect sunlight while releasing heat as infrared radiation. During outdoor testing in direct sunlight, the purple fabric remained 4.2°C (7.6°F) cooler than commercial white cotton and 6.2°C (11.2°F) cooler than conventional purple cotton.

Creating a colorful cooling fabric isn’t as simple as dyeing an existing material, though. Purple presents a particular challenge because conventional purple fabrics need to absorb green light, which falls within one of the strongest regions of the sun’s energy. This absorbed energy can then be converted into heat.

To solve this problem, a team of researchers, including Jun Ma, PhD, a materials engineering professor at Adelaide University who co-authored the study, turned to metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, a class of porous crystalline materials whose development was recognized with the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They used a cobalt-based MOF to give the textile its purple color while helping it release heat as infrared radiation.

The resulting material reflects an average of 87.6% of incoming solar radiation while emitting 96.4% of mid-infrared radiation. Some of that infrared energy can pass through Earth’s atmosphere and escape toward the much colder environment of outer space, allowing the fabric to shed heat without requiring electricity.

Radiative-cooling textiles have traditionally been white or silver because these colors are particularly effective at reflecting sunlight. But for clothing, that leaves little room for personal expression. The new research demonstrates that colorful fabrics could potentially offer the same cooling benefits.

The purple textile isn’t ready to appear in stores just yet. But its success suggests that staying cool in the future might not mean having to dress entirely in white. By changing how fabric interacts with light, researchers could eventually create clothing that keeps us cooler while still allowing for plenty of color.