To prove his point, last year Aizome launched a skin care product called Wastecare Created from Aizome’s own industrial wastewater, it has won awards for creative advertising at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the Webby Awards, and Fast Company. It is collaborating with a pharmaceutical company in Japan to register its wastewater as an active cosmetic ingredient in the International Cosmetic Ingredient Nomenclature system so that other companies can use it in their products.
The first orders of Aizome’s naturally dyed medical T-shirts (the start of its Healthware line) are expected to ship in July.
Totally intended to treat
At first, I wasn’t sure what to think about May. I’ve met plenty of overly ambitious social entrepreneurs who say they’re going to change the world one bag or one pair of shoes at a time. May is Ambitious, but strategic. He founded Aizome to prove that modern, colourfast, naturally dyed textiles are possible, that they are better for us and that people are willing to pay more for textiles that do not contain harmful chemicals.
When I first spoke to May in December 2023, he was in northern Thailand on a two-month work retreat. He had brought with him the six-person Aizome team, as well as his wife (Aizome’s co-founder), their newborn baby, and an environmental lawyer, Karen Wade Cavanagh.
Cavanagh has spent her career working on the legal side of building cleanup efforts after anthrax attacks and natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Her job involved protecting people in public spaces and commercial buildings from dangerous contaminants and harsh chemicals. “We know these chemicals are not safe,” she says, referencing things like formaldehyde. “We don’t expect to live with them, breathe with them, sleep with them.”
What he’s saying is that unless you’re truly scrupulous, your home is probably full of poorly regulated consumer products that emit harmful volatile organic chemicals, leach endocrine disruptors like BPA and phthalates, and shed plastic microfibers. Infused with dangerous chemicals.
Cavanagh was drawn to Aizome because of the complexity of navigating medical device regulations set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And she wants something like that. Aizoma It had been available when her children were young. Cavanagh’s children, now adults, have suffered from allergies, ulcerative colitis and asthma so severe that they have ended up in the hospital. One couldn’t stand the feeling of clothing labels touching her skin. “I know my son was always sensitive to what he was wearing. I didn’t understand it, but I knew it was real,” she says. “And yet people with these problems go to the doctor and are told it’s imaginary, which doesn’t help, or they are given medication and told there’s nothing they can do.”
While most supplements have a disclaimer stating that they are not intended to treat, mitigate or cure any disease, Aizome sheets are now registered in FDA as Class 1 medical devices intended to mitigate and alleviate skin problems.
This strategy seems to be working. Aizome is very popular in the eczema community: it was recommended by the National Eczema Society until last year when, ironically, the NES eliminated the entire textile category, claiming that textile products are too complicated to evaluate.
May has been determined to prove his theories. He was one of the authors, along with two Egyptian researchers and a researcher from the University of Cambridge, of a Study 2022 The healing properties of indigo are shown in the Journal of Applied Biomedicine. Aizome is opening a research division to use government grants to test the medicinal properties and microbiome effects of the dyed fabrics. Research demonstrates the antibacterial properties of indigo It’s been around for a while (Aizome claims that these properties help neutralize body odor.).
Even if you think this is all nonsense, if you have the money to spend, there’s no harm in getting a good night’s sleep on some fancy pastel cotton sheets, without the anxiety of knowing what synthetic chemicals might be lurking in them. A calm mind leads to better rest.
