Real silk, art silk and silk highlights: which do you have?
Three very different things get called a silk rug, and the cleaning is different for each. A real silk rug has a silk pile, usually on a silk or cotton foundation: Persian Qom and Isfahan, Turkish Hereke, Kashmir from India, and Chinese silk rugs. They are very finely knotted, often 400 to 1,000 knots per square inch, they change color as you walk around them because silk reflects light directionally, and they are expensive. A silk‑highlight rug is a wool rug with silk knotted into outlines and details, common in Tabriz, Nain and Hereke wool rugs. An "art silk" rug is viscose, rayon, bamboo silk or mercerized cotton, sold to look like silk and behaving nothing like it in water; it has its own page.
The burn test is the honest way to tell: a single fiber from the fringe or back that smells like burning hair and leaves a brittle black bead is protein, meaning silk (or wool). One that smells like burning paper is cellulose, meaning viscose or cotton. We do this at inspection, and we are frank with customers from Great Neck and Woodbury who bought "silk" that turned out to be viscose.
Silk absorbs a third of its weight in water without feeling wet, loses much of its strength while it is wet, and is permanently damaged by heat, alkalinity and rough handling. Every step below follows from that.
- Fiber
- Silk pile; silk or cotton foundation
- Origins
- Qom and Isfahan (Iran), Hereke (Turkey), Kashmir (India), China
- Knot density
- 400–1,000+ per sq in
- Never
- Immersion, steam, hot water, alkaline detergent, wringing, floor cleaning
- Common on Long Island
- 3×5 to 6×9 pieces, prayer‑rug sizes, silk‑highlight Tabriz and Nain room sizes
- Our method
- Fiber test → dye test → gentle dusting → flat hand wash, cool water → hand rinse → blotting → cool flat dry → hand finishing
