Raven’s View

We’ve got the new Patagonia Capilene in now, and it looks good. In case you haven’t heard, Patagonia overhauled the Capilene line. One of the biggest improvements came with the addition of a stench-fighting treatment called Gladiodor.

It’s no secret that, after a while, Patagonia’s Capilene can hold body odor. Even so, I’ve always considered it the best baselayer out there. With the new-and-improved comeback of wool, however, and that fabric’s odor-fighting properties, I guess Chouinard and Co. had to come up with something different.

The coolest thing about this new treatment, called Gladiodor, has to be that it comes from crabs.

Well, more or less. Gladiodor is a made of chitosan, a processed form of chitin. What’s chitin, you ask? Why, it’s only the second most common polysaccharide found in nature, behind cellulose. Duh.

Chitin is the stuff on the inside of a crab shell that keeps bacteria from growing. Most commercial chitosan comes from either sea shrimp or crabs.

The craziest thing about chitosan has to be its pervasiveness in our society. We use it in all kinds of stuff: cholesterol drugs, weight loss supplements, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial treatments, cosmetics, plant growth supplements, water filtration… it’s even used to clarify beer and wine.

Cool, huh?

Even better, chitosan comes from a renewable resource and crabs aren’t endangered. The chitin is often extracted after the crab meat has been removed, so there is little waste.

The end result: Gladiodor reduces bacteria by 97 percent, cutting down on that notorious funk.

By the way, because wool is all the rage right now in baselayers, Patagonia has a new wool line. We’ve got that, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 4th, 2006 at 7:59 am and is filed under Raven's View Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.