Five ways to find out what a garment is made of

1. Reading the care label yourself

Cost: nothing. Time: about thirty seconds. Availability: it is already in your hand.

The fiber line is legally required, in the US under FTC textile rules and in the EU under the Textile Regulation, and it lists fibers in descending order by weight. That order carries information. "95% cotton, 5% elastane" and "52% cotton, 48% polyester" are different garments, and both get sold as cotton.

Reading the tag carefully beats not reading it, and most people skip it. Cotton Incorporated's Lifestyle Monitor finds 63% of consumers say fiber content matters to their purchase decision, while only 42% always or usually check the label. Closing that gap costs nothing, and no app is required to do it.

A few things worth noticing while you are there:

• A certification logo with no certificate number printed near it
• "Wrinkle-free", "stain-proof" or "antimicrobial" claims, which point to chemical finishes
• An online product page that never states fiber content at all

The limit is structural, and it is the reason this page exists. The label is the claim under examination, so reading it more closely cannot tell you whether it is accurate. It can improve your odds. In the 2026 EU campaign, blends of natural and man-made fibers failed 64% of the time, while claims of 100% of a single natural fiber failed 15% of the time. A simpler claim is a claim with better odds, and that is a genuinely useful thing to know at a rack.

Best for: every purchase, as the first step. It is free, it is instant, and it narrows the field.

2. Brand-rating apps

These score a company rather than a garment. They aggregate published material: policy documents, disclosure reports, supply-chain statements, third-party assessments, sometimes regulatory findings. The output is usually a letter grade or a score out of five, attached to the brand.

For the question they were built to answer, they work. If you want to know whether a company publishes where its factories are, or how it handles wages, or whether its environmental reporting is audited, this is the tool. That is real research, and doing it yourself would take hours.

What they cannot do is test garments. A brand score is a statement about corporate behavior in aggregate; the sweater in your hand is one item from one production run, made in one factory, from yarn bought on one particular week. Composition errors enter through supply-chain drift, substitutions mid-order, paperwork copied forward from last season. A company with strong published policies can still ship an inaccurate label, and a company nobody has rated can ship a perfectly accurate one.

Best for: choosing which companies to give money to. Not for finding out what a specific garment contains.

3. Label-scanner apps that read a photo of the tag

This is the category most people mean when they search for an app to scan a clothing label. You photograph the care tag, a model reads it, and you get back a clean structured answer: the fiber percentages, the care symbols decoded, often a plain-language note on what that blend tends to be like to wear.

They are good at this. A model reads a folded, faded, four-language tag faster and more consistently than you do, it does not misread "modal" as "wool" at the end of a long day, and it keeps a history so you can look up what you bought in March. If reading tags is the friction, this genuinely removes it.

No better model fixes the limit here, because the constraint is the input. The app is reading the label, and the label is the thing in question. A photo of a tag carries exactly the information the tag carries, so an AI reading of that photo can be a faster, better-organized version of the seller's claim and nothing more. Nothing in the pipeline ever touched the fabric.

That distinction matters most in exactly the case where you care most. If a tag reads 100% cotton and the fabric is 52% polyester, a label scanner reports 100% cotton with high confidence, because it read the tag correctly. The reading was accurate. The tag was not.

Best for: reading tags quickly and keeping a record. Not for verification, and the better apps in this category do not claim otherwise.

4. Certification databases

This is the free option people most often overlook, and it deserves more attention than it gets.

OEKO-TEX® Standard 100 and GOTS®, the Global Organic Textile Standard, both work the same way underneath: a certificate carries a number, and that number resolves in the certifier's own public database. Anyone can check it, for free, in about thirty seconds. OEKO-TEX runs Label Check; GOTS runs a public licensee database. You do not need us, or any app, to do this.

What each one answers is specific. OEKO-TEX Standard 100 means the finished garment, dyes and finishes included, was lab-tested against limits for more than 1,000 substances. It comes in classes, and Class I is the strictest, written for children under three. GOTS requires at least 95% organic content and adds environmental and social criteria along the supply chain. Certificates carry dates and renew, so an expired one tells you something too.

The credibility lives in the lookup rather than the logo. Any brand can print a leaf. Not any brand can produce a valid, current certificate number that resolves in an independent registry and matches the product in front of you.

Two honest limits. First, coverage is narrow by design: a database only contains garments whose maker chose to apply and pay for certification, so most of a shop is simply absent from it. Second, a certificate answers the question it was written for. Chemical limits on the finished product, or organic content and supply-chain criteria. Neither scheme exists to confirm that the "60% cotton, 40% polyester" on this particular tag is arithmetically correct.

Best for: any garment that shows a certificate number. Check it. It is free and authoritative, and it is the single highest-value thirty seconds available to a shopper.

5. Independent laboratory testing of the actual garment

This is what we commission, and it is worth being precise about the arrangement. Lynen does not operate a laboratory. We commission independent accredited laboratories, the accreditation standard being ISO/IEC 17025, and we pay them to test physical garments. Brands do not pay us for placement, cannot buy a better result, and cannot remove one they dislike.

The methods are not ours either, and that is the point. Fiber identification uses microscopy and solubility behavior under methods like AATCC 20. The percentages come from quantitative analysis standardized in the ISO 1833 series and AATCC 20A: pick a solvent that dissolves one fiber and leaves the other intact, weigh the sample, dissolve, dry, weigh what remains. The difference is the dissolved fiber's share. A scale, a solvent, and arithmetic. These are the same established methods brands and regulators use when they test.

What you see in the app is the claim next to the measured result, with the sources shown so you can check them. Where a garment carries a certificate, we link it alongside our own testing rather than replacing it.

The limits here are real and we would rather state them than have you discover them:

• Testing is destructive, so laboratories test representative samples of a product, not the specific item in your hands. Treat a result as strong evidence about that product rather than a certificate for your garment.
• Fiber content can drift between production runs and factories.
• Every test costs real money, which is why coverage grows garment by garment rather than all at once.

Best for: the purchases where being right matters. The coat, the crib sheets, the thing you are paying a premium for specifically because of what it says it is made of.

The five approaches, side by side

Where our own coverage is thin

Three things we would want a careful reader to know before deciding we are useful.

Coverage is the big one. Each verification is a physical laboratory test on a physical garment, and each one has an invoice attached. That makes the catalog grow steadily rather than instantly, and it means you will scan things we have not tested. When that happens the app says the garment is not yet verified, in those words. When we have not checked, we say so, because a verification product that fills gaps with guesses has quietly become the thing it was built to replace. Submitting a garment genuinely moves the queue; it is the clearest signal we get about what people actually want tested.

Scope is the second. We test what a garment is made of. That is one question, answered properly, rather than every question you might have about a company or a supply chain. For company-level questions, the rating apps are doing work we are not.

Durability is the third. Pilling and color fading are the top two measured causes of garment failure, according to a UK WRAP and Defra survey analyzed in the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2022, and the laboratory tests that predict both already exist. They are simply never shown at retail. Wear testing is coming to verified garments, and where that data exists you will see it alongside composition. It is not live today, and we are not going to describe it as though it were.

What about digital product passports

A reasonable question, since the regulation is already moving. Under the EU's Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, in force since 2024, garments sold in Europe are expected to carry a scannable digital product passport around 2027, with the detailed rules still being finalized. It will disclose composition, origin, care and end-of-life handling in a format your phone can read.

That is a real improvement to the format. It does not change the source. A digital product passport is a record the brand declares about its own product, which is the same origin as today's label, with more fields and better plumbing. Moving a claim from a stitched-in tag to a QR code does not test it. When passports arrive, a brand-declared passport sitting next to an independent laboratory result is a complete picture, and either one on its own is half of it.

What we would actually do

Stack them, cheapest first. Almost nobody needs all five on the same garment.

• Read the fiber line. Thirty seconds, free, and it rules a lot out.
• If there is a certificate number, check it in the certifier's own database. Free, authoritative, and faster than you expect.
• If reading tags is a chore, a label scanner will read them faster than you do. Just hold the result as what it is: a cleanly formatted version of the seller's claim.
• For questions about the company rather than the garment, use a brand rating.
• For the purchases where the composition is the reason you are buying, look for an independent laboratory result on the actual garment.

One note on why people ask in the first place. If you are choosing fabric with skin in mind, the properties that matter are physical: synthetics trap heat and moisture against skin, while cotton and linen move moisture away from it. That is general wellness information rather than medical advice, and anything touching a diagnosed condition belongs with a clinician who knows your situation.

The honest summary is that several of these tools are genuinely good at their own job, and none of them can tell you whether a label is accurate. That last question is the one we pay laboratories to answer, one garment at a time, and it is the only one we claim.