A study of black fleece garments: Can fleece fibres be recognized and how variable are they?

Fleece garments are very popular nowadays. This is reflected in forensic fibre cases where fleece garments and especially black colored items are frequently encountered. For this study 201 black and dark colored fleece garments were collected from co-workers, friends, family and shops. The constituent fibres were analyzed with common methods used in forensic fibre analyses: microscopy (bright field, polarized light, fluorescence); microspectrophotometry (MSP-visible range); infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and comparison microscopy. Almost all fleece fabrics were made of 100% polyester fibres. The most abundant fibre type involved polygonal polyester fibres. The appearance of typical fleece-features was explored. It was found that fleece fibres would shed easily, resulting in many long polyester fibres. In many cases these fleece fibres showed typical "mushroom-ends" and in some cases a few thicker fibres that originated from the inner "base layer" of the fleece fabric were also found providing a second fibre type that can be lost from fleece fabrics. Most of the black fleece fabrics could be discriminated with the analytical techniques, the discriminating power DP was found to be 0.9985. This was despite the fact that most of the absorption spectra showed similar features in the visible range. They were denominated as TYPE 1 MSP-spectra and displayed 2 absorption bands at 450 nm and 600 nm.