Ranking the world's softest woolsfrom @fineasjackson

Transcript

See this cashmere hat? It looks super soft, right? What if I told you that standard cashmere isn't even close to the softest wool you can get? This is episode three of Chasing Beauty. Today, we're looking at the softest animal fibers on Earth. To understand softness, you need one number: the micron. It's a measurement of thickness. A human hair is about 75 microns. Most wool clusters around tier, but the holy grail of softness is about 12. Most people think of merino as the standard good, and for an average merino sheep, it is. But tier is a specific lineage called the Saxony merino. In the Laurel No record bale competition, an Australian farm called Pyrenees Park produced a bale that measured at 10.2 microns. That is thinner than a cloud and thinner than almost any cashmere. But even at 10.2, no has a structural problem. It has teeth. Under a microscope, no scales are tall, protruding about 0.8 microns. Even the thinnest merino can still cause friction on the skin. That's why baby cashmere harvested from the Copra Hercus kits in Better Mongolia often feels better. It's thicker, around 13.5 microns, but the scales are flatter creating that buttery silky hand feel that no lacks. The undisputed king of legal luxury is vicuna. Sourced from the wild camelids in the Peruvian Andes, they are shorn only once every three years in a sacred Incan ceremony called the chaku. At 12 microns with scales flatter than baby cashmere, vicuna is one of the softest legal fibers in the world. A vicuna coat from Loro Piana can easily fetch $25,000 Better there is one softer. At the very bottom of the micron scale sits a fiber that is legally a worst, the shatush. Harvested from the endangered cheru or Tibetan antelope, these fibers measure at a staggering nine-ten microns. But it's not just thinness, it's the smoothness. Shatush has a scale density of just 5.3 scales per 100 microns, the lowest ever recorded in a mammal. Famously, a full sized shawl can glide through a wedding ring. Because the churro must be killed to harvest its fur, Shatoosh is banned worldwide. Scarves or shawls can fetch over $20,000 on the black market. That's all for today's episode. Peace.