Is wearing black in summer always a bad idea? Maybe, wearing black is actually cool!

Have you ever been told not to wear black because it’s too hot outside or to wear white because it’s too hot outside? Well, it’s an interesting notion that has come in that light colours or white help to keep your body cooler. 

It was in the 1980s that four researchers saw that a particular desert community known as the Boudins had been wearing black woollen outfits despite living in such a hot and harsh climate. ‘Does it not make things worse for them in the desert?’ was a major question that came into their head. Further pushing them to research more into the role of colours in actually helping to keep the body cool. 

Published in the Nature journal in 1980, ‘Why do Bedouins wear black robes in hot deserts?’ was an article and experiment done by Amiram Shkolnik, C. Richard Taylor, Virginia Finch and Arieh Borut. This revealed an extraordinary property of black clothing that was forgotten while running behind lighter shades of clothes—its ability to absorb heat much better than the lighter colours. While white or lighter shades tend to reflect heat more, it was automatically assumed that they would be better for avoiding heat. However, when it comes to desert communities, their attire is often a loose gown, which allows good airflow within the garment. 

In such cases, having white clothing can often backfire. Since white shades reflect, imagine heat being reflected multiple times within the clothes, creating possibly one of the most uncomfortable, stickiest situations to be in a desert. Clearly, the desert communities had realised that black clothing would help in absorbing the heat rather than reflecting it. Resulting in a cooler body temperature despite the heat outside. In earlier experiments, body heat was often not taken into consideration, which led to a generalised view that white clothes are better in summer without any alternative theories related to the topic.

So next time, someone asks you to change out of your black clothes because it’s hot, tell them all about the research that came out of just a gentle curiosity towards what one wears!

A Jordanian Bedouin rides a camel in the ancient Nabatean city of Petra

The experiment

The research team – consisting of four researchers from Harvard and Tel Aviv University—started out by measuring the overall heat and gain and loss while wearing a black and a white robe. A volunteer was asked to stand in the desert at midday wearing a black Bedouin robe and a similar white one, apart from two other garments, to compare the temperature. 

The result was quite surprising for the science academia, and the report says, “The amount of heat gained by a Bedouin exposed to the hot desert is the same whether he wears a black or a white robe.” However, the astonishing part is how the additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin.” Thus ruling out the theory that black is in fact not a bad choice for a stroll in the desert, provided you are wearing the right fit.

The scientists observed that Bedouins wear their robes loosely. Inside, cooling occurs through convection (the movement of particles through a substance, transporting their heat energy from hotter areas to cooler areas)—either through a bellows action as the robes flow in the wind or through a chimney effect as air rises between the robe and skin.