Sheet Garment Selection QA
Not medical advice. These checks are literacy. They are not an allergy test and not a device certificate.
Executive summary
Before you wear or resell a bought sheet garment, industrial glove specs give you words for holes, powder, protein, odor, and bloom. A fashion catsuit is not an ASTM D3578 exam glove. The words still help you look.
Use this when you buy secondhand sheet, inspect a custom commission, or decide go/no-go on first wear. Reaction classes: Allergy and Skin Contact. Do not treat this page as a patch test.
Borrowed QC words
ASTM D3578 is the product standard for dipped NR examination gloves: holes, powder, protein, tensile. ASTM D5151 is a water-leak test for medical gloves. It does not report the smallest hole it can find. You are holding sheet up to a window, not running that lab method.
What is a pinhole here?
A pinhole is a through-thickness void. On bought sheet, look for a bright speck when you stretch a panel against light. That is inspection, not a glove leak test.
What is calendered sheet?
Calendered sheet is factory rubber pressed to thickness between heated rollers. Fashion sheet from a supplier is usually this: it arrives ready to cut and glue, not as liquid in a bottle.
Pre-wear checklist
Light and stretch. Hold each panel to a window. Stretch. Look for pinholes and thin spots.
Powder. Medical powdered gloves were banned as an unreasonable risk. Workplace NIOSH framing: powder can carry NRL allergens. If you see talc in a crotch or underarm, treat it as a soil, not as a protein number.
Odor. Factory reodorants mask curative, putrefaction, and microbial smells at 0.25–0.5 phr. The handbook prefers fixing the cause. A sniff is not a protein assay.
What is phr?
phr is parts per hundred rubber. 0.25–0.5 phr reodorant is a quarter to a half gram of masker per 100 grams of rubber.
Bloom vs crack. Chalky bloom and oriented cracks are aging symptoms. Map them in Sheet Aging, Storage and Care.
Stop. New rash or breathing trouble: stop wear. See Allergy and Skin Contact.
Medical devices that contain NRL must carry a caution under 21 CFR 801.437 and must not say “hypoallergenic” on that device. Retail fashion sheet usually has no equivalent label.
Hardware stains and stiff rings around snaps: Sheet Hardware & Metal Contact.
Deep dives (optional)
Deep dive: Protein assay methods (glove lineage)
ASTM D5712 measures total aqueous extractable protein in NR products, reported in µg/dm². It is residual-protein testing, not a diagnosis of a wearer.
ASTM D6499 measures antigenic protein by an immunological method. It is not a measure of allergenic proteins. The correlation is not fully established.
ISO 12243 is the assay method for water-extractable protein in NR medical gloves. It is not a sampling plan, a safety limit, or a labeling rule.
Fashion sheet almost never prints these numbers. Light and stretch cannot replace a lab extraction.
Deep dive: What aged sheet looks like
Ozone cracks run perpendicular to stress and usually cover a wide area. Flex cracks are also oriented but stay in the high-strain zone. UV cracking is non-oriented over the exposed face.
On the bench: sticky tack (chain scission), hard or brittle (extra crosslinks), chalky bloom (wax or antidegradant), oriented cracks (ozone or flex). Polish does not change ozone-crack shape.