Silicone softener has become an ideal choice for fabric softening due to its excellent performance. It can give fabrics a soft, smooth, plump and elastic texture, while making the fabrics wrinkle-resistant, wear-resistant, washable and have good sewing performance, greatly increasing the added value of the product and being deeply loved by customers. However, it is easy to produce defects such as silicone oil spots during use, which brings troubles to dyeing and finishing.

Silicone softener has specific suitable working conditions and physical and chemical characteristics. The working bath pH value is best when it is 5-6.5; the suitable working bath temperature is 30-45℃; in terms of ionicity, most are cationic, followed by non-ionic, and a few are anionic, and cationic is generally better in softening effect.

Silicone softener has gone through four generations of development. The first generation of dimethyl silicone oil and hydroxyl-modified silicone oil are low-cost, but not washable and easy to demulsify. The second generation of epoxy-modified and amino-modified silicone softeners, although each has its own emphasis on the hand feel style, have the problem of being non-hydrophilic and easy to demulsify, and amino-modified silicone oil will also have yellowing phenomenon. The third generation of polyether-modified silicone softeners has good hydrophilicity and is not easy to demulsify, but the hand feel is poor. The fourth generation of linear block copolymer-modified silicone softeners combines many advantages such as good hydrophilicity, soft hand feel, low yellowing, and not easy to demulsify, representing the development direction of silicone softeners.