Glossary → Crocking
Crocking.
color rubbing off a finished print onto skin or another fabric
Color transferring off a finished print by rubbing, onto skin, a car seat, or the white shirt worn underneath. It is measured rather than eyeballed: a crockmeter rubs a white test cloth across the print under set conditions, and the grade comes from how much color ended up on that cloth, not from how the print looks afterwards (AATCC TM8 and TM116, ISO 105-X12). Dry and wet are separate runs, so a piece can pass one and fail the other. What transfers is pigment that never bound to the fiber, which makes a failure a process problem, and it reaches you as a complaint and a returned batch after the whole run has shipped.