Getting a Grip: The Essentials of Textured Disposable Gloves
Here’s what companies need to know about textured disposable gloves.
Rubber gloves, including nitrile and latex, have been around for just over a hundred years. Over that period of time, the applications for protection have grown from surgical and medical uses to industrial uses such as assembly, food processing and maintenance. In more recent years, more general applications—such as light manufacturing, gardening and DIY—have grown in demand. With this ever-increasing and diverse demand, various performance properties, such as grip, needed to evolve.
Glove producers began learning from other rubber-based products with specific grip needs, such as tires and running shoes. As tires and running shoes developed multiple treaded patterns designed for various conditions, glove producers and users took note. As with early tires and running shoes, initial glove patterns involved a series of grooves and nodules similar to the tread of a tire.
Ultimately, glove texture developed into more commonly known grip patterns such as raised diamond, fish scale, honeycomb, pebble and sand patch, which were first developed for the palms of heavy-duty rubber gloves used in industries such as poultry processing. Many of the early “canner’s” gloves were used to pluck chicken feathers.
The plucking process utilized a heavy-duty rubber glove with patterns on the palm side of the left and right gloves. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the thinner, disposable glove makers began to adapt these same patterns into the palms and fingers for their markets. Minor sand patch texture all over the glove evolved to the same texture but was used only on the fingertips. The new millennium brought more traditional diamond and fish scale patterns to the disposable glove market.
Factors Affecting Grip
Before discussing the actual shape and physical characteristics of grip, it is important to understand something that most people don’t realize. Glove materials and manufacturing processes are equal to or more critical to grip than the actual grip pattern.
Let’s start with the materials used in the product. Natural rubber latex, for example, inherently has a higher tack level than nitrile. Higher tack is another word for higher grip properties. All else held constant, a natural latex glove would have a better grip than a nitrile glove. This is why natural latex is the preferred material of choice for many applications, such as surgical gloves and dishwashing gloves. Surgical gloves require very good grip without a heavy texture to interfere with dexterity.
