100% Natural Latex

It has come to the attention of the community that ALEX is neither skin safe or long lasting when it comes to creating your own mermaid tail. Which leaves us with Platinum Silicone and Latex, neither of which I'm certain how environmentally friendly they are.

For Latex a lot of people are allergic and are either unable to use it to make their tails or may not want to risk an allergic reaction from someone who touches their tail. Personally I would feel awful if a child wanted to touch my tail but was allergic to latex and got sick from it.

For platinum silicone I was able to find this quote explaining that silicone "is not toxic to aquatic or soil organisms, it is not hazardous waste, and while it is not biodegradable, it can be recycled after a lifetime of use."

So I went to google to try and find an environmentally friendly, biodegradable, hypoallergenic material to make realistic tails out of. Impossible? Nope. I discovered that there are two types of Latex, the chemical engineered stuff and a natural latex. Natural latex is a natural occurrence in over 2,000 different plant species, is hypoallergenic and biodegradable.

I found the reason for it being hypoallergenic is that the average latex found everywhere now and days has a closed cell formation which prevents proteins from being washed out during the processing phase, and natural latex has an open cell make up which means the proteins (which is what people are allergic to) gets removed from it during processing.

As it is a natural occurrence in nature if left to it's own devices in nature it will biodegrade. I got the majority of my information about it from here. I found other sites explaining it but a lot of it was biochemical or technical and just didn't make sense to me. Dark Fin Gloves uses this natural latex for a very successful product that I am certainly going to purchase.

I have sent emails to the few companies I could find that use this material asking questions, I don't know if I will hear back from them or not. If they do I will be sure to share what I learn from them here.

I know this would require testing and more research to see if it a suitable replacement for tail making, but I thought this was to good of a product to wait to share. Especially sense it might be a while before I am able to test it as I would like to, what with latex becoming unusable in the cold and it now snowing here.

how incredibly interesting, I'd love to put this in the community blog

Go for it! I'll post my experimental results once I am able to do some, wont be for a little while as I have finals to deal with.

^ Can't wait to see the experimental results :)