Natural Colorants in the Presence of Anchors So-Called Mordants as Promising Coloring and Antimicrobial Agents for Textile Materials

In recent years there has been a phenomenal increase in the use of natural colorants in a variety of areas. They exhibit high biodegradability, low toxicity, and green chemistry and have potential to greatly impact the textile dyeing and finishing industry. Natural colorants from plant sources have been recently discovered as novel agents in imparting multifunctional properties to textiles such as antimicrobial, insect repellent, deodorizing, and UV-protective. Among all textile surface modifications, antimicrobial finishing has become a very promising, high growth research area due to their potential to provide quality and safety benefits to different kinds of textile materials. The use of natural colorants offers promise in developing antimicrobial textiles for aesthetic, hygienic, and medical applications owing to the presence of potent highly active agents such as tannins, flavonoids, quinines carotenoids, and alkaloids in their extracts. This article presents a concise account of the state-of-the art sustainable technology derived from natural colorants and will be useful to the textile and polymer chemists engaged in development of health care bioactive textiles. In particular, it discusses recent developments in coloring and antimicrobial finishing of textiles with different class of compounds isolated from natural colorants, highlights current challenges, and finally concludes by providing a perspective on future research directions in this area.