Nat. Prod. Bioprospect. DOI 10.1007/s13659-017-0119-9 REVIEW ARTICLE Natural Colorants: Historical, Processing and Sustainable Prospects Mohd Yusuf . Mohd Shabbir . Faqeer Mohammad Received: 11 November 2016 / Accepted: 2 January 2017 Ó The Author(s) 2017. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract With the public’s mature demand in recent times pressurized the textile industry for use of natural colorants, without any harmful effects on environment and aquatic ecosystem, and with more developed functionalities simultaneously. Advanced developments for the natural bio-resources and their sustainable use for multifunctional clothing are gaining pace now. Present review highlights historical overview of natural colorants, classification and predominantly processing of colorants from sources, application on textiles surfaces with the functionalities provided by them. Chemistry of natural colorants on textiles also discussed with relevance to adsorption isotherms and kinetic models for dyeing of textiles. Graphical Abstract Keywords Natural colorants Á Textiles Á Sustainability Á Processing Á Adsorption Á Application M. Yusuf (&) F. Mohammad Department of Chemistry, Y.M.D. College, Maharshi Dayanand e-mail:
[email protected] University, Nuh, Haryana 122107, India e-mail:
[email protected] M. Shabbir Á F. Mohammad Department of Chemistry, Jamia Millia Islamia (A Central University), New Delhi 110025, India e-mail:
[email protected] 123 M. Yusuf et al. 1 Introduction Western countries to exploit their high technical skills in the advancements of textile materials for high quality, Nature has always dominated over synthetic or artificial, technical performances, and side by side development of from the beginning of this world as nature was the only cleaner production strategies for cost-effective value added option for human being then, and now with advantageous textile products [8].