We don’t mean to be alarmist, but we sometimes see “silk rugs” that are made of something other than genuine, natural silk. This is not a problem if you know that the rug you are considering is made of artificial silk, but sometimes rug dealers neglect to pass on this information! The problem happens most often with just a few rug types sold in tourist markets in Turkey and India (and sometimes in Pakistan).
Real Silk
https://www.globalsynturf.com/
Real silk is produced as the cocoon covering of the silkworm, the pupal form of the Asian or mulberry silk moth, bombyx mori. The cocoon is spun by the silk moth caterpillar of a single silk fiber that can be up to several thousand feet in length. To harvest the silk, completed cocoons are boiled or heated to kill the silkworms, then laboriously unwound into single fibers which are plied together and spun into thread or silk yarn.
Artificial Silk
Artificial silk is everything billed as silk that doesn’t come from the silkworm cocoon. Most often this means mercerized cotton; sometimes it means a manufactured fiber like rayon or a blend of chemically altered and/or manufactured fibers. It’s not that artificial silk is intrinsically evil, it’s just that the whole point of using artificial silk in a rug is to save the cost of real silk. It is not nice when this cheaper, artificial silk rug is misrepresented and sold for the price of a real silk rugs.