BrainStuff Classics: Why Does Cashmere Cost So Much?

which she cares. She said, think of the word capricious, that comes from the word caprine, which is Latin for goat.

The goats are one of at least eleven wool producing animals. The list also includes sheep, rabbits, and lama. There are several varieties of kashmir goats and a number of farms, factories, and conglomerates around the world using various production methods to make cashmere. The first goats purported to be used by humans to produce fabric to keep warm are said to be the Pashima goats. They are found in the super

high altitude regions of western and northern Tibet. The goat's soft and dense underfur is built to withstand extreme temperatures as low as negative forty degrees fahrenheit or celsius. The wool from these bucks and nannies, favoured by British Royalty, eventually came to be processed in cashmere in northern India, hence the name. Various bloodlines of kashmere goats have, with

human help, spread around the world. Australia has a particular breed that provides luxuriously soft threads, and North American kashmere goat are found in the colder regions of the US and Canada. North America is where pia and her husband, Peter Goff, come in. They have run Springtide farms since nineteen ninety seven. Pia bought goth eleven goats for his birthday in part to help clear their farmland. It has

been a learning experience since then. Pia estimates its Springtide is one of two hundred to three hundred cashmere goat farms in North America. Most cashmere goat farms in the US are small in size, less than sixty goats, says Paya, who is also the president of the Kashmir Goat Association, a nonprofit whose website claims it brings together breeders, fiber artists, and others interested in these charming animals and the fiber

they grow in March and April. You know, early spring is when the goats start to naturally shed their winter wool and when production begins on the farms. Few US farms shear these cashmere goats, though, because of production laws

and the high cost to weed out the valuable downy undercoat. Instead, most facilities hand comb the w That means workers often the farm owners themselves sit with each animal and slowly tease out the fur that creates the fine wool for Kashmir with a dog rake up to an hour and a half per Goatpaya explained, when you look at these goats, you see the long draping fur. That's the guard hair.

The Kashmere hair is under that. The crimp in Kashmere is three dimensional, and that's part of what makes Kashmir so incredibly soft. An average goat provides just three to four ounces of cashmere that's about eighty five to one hundred and ten grams. That means it typically takes about six goats to make enough fiber for just one cashmere sweater. Once the Kashmir fur is separated, samples of it are sent for quality testing to one of two labs in

the US, one in Texas one in Colorado. Most legitimate US kashmere farmers have made a commitment to provide only high quality fiber, outlined in the Kashmir Goat Association standards and backed by organizations like the Kashmir and Camel Hair Manufacturer's Institute. That means consistency or uniformity in the fiber. Each follicle should be at least one point twenty five inches that's three point two centimeters in length in its relaxed or unstretched state, and no bigger than nineteen microns

in diameter. If wearing wool makes you itch, that's actually because the woolf fibers have an uneven thickness. The standard thickness of wool is twenty eight microns. Cashmere is much finer. That standard of less than nineteen microns is why cashmere can feel less scratchy. Cashmere that fails to beat these standards inevitably creates quality problems like pilling in the final product, and there are plenty of examples of bad cashmere out there.

While the Federal Trade Commission enforces the Wool Product Labeling Act in the United States, it gets murky on the international market. Even the FTC says quote routine testing of fiber contents by a qualified, independent testing lab is the best way to assure accurate labels. That means it's hard for consumers to determine where the cashmere there by comes from and specifically how the goats are treated. Cashmir demand is one of the problems. It reportedly far exceeds how

much goats could produce every year. That means less scrupulous producers may turn to inhumane methods to produce more wool or lesser operating costs. The organization PETA has accused Chinese conglomerates of shearing the goats midwinter, when the animals need the fur to keep warm. Pias says that some farms, to save production costs, have even experimented with restricting goat's diets. But aside from compromising the animal's health, it also directly

affects the quality of the cashmere. She said. If you starve your animals, the hair will get finer and shorter and more brittle. You can't spin it. They call it hunger fine. So if you wear cashmere, Pia recommends buying directly from the source or choosing very carefully. Cashmeer will consist of about one percent of a goat's total wool production. For apparel, so the fabric and those sweaters should have

a price to reflect the scarcity. Even for farmers like Pia, who sells her cashmere online and at fairs and festivals, it's difficult to tell if it's the real deal. Pia herself has been fooled. She recalls a time when she found kashmere sweater at a store for less than one hundred dollars she bought it. It turned out to be a crylic. Another time, she and her husband were visited by a group of people who said they were interested

in getting into the Kashmir industry. They brought with them samples of Kashmeir they had bought at trade shows in Italy. Pyah recalls they had this one shawl. It was shiny, and Kashmere isn't shiny, so we had to say to them, you know, this is really nice. I don't know what it is, but it's not Kashmir. Today's episode is based on the article why is Kashmir so Expensive? On how

stuffworks dot Com, written by Jamie Allen. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.