I have Natural Latex sheet material that is smooth & some that is also chlorinated so it's friction is significantly reduced.

 

Overall Latex is pretty scratch resistant to things like your fingers, tissue, microfiber cloths running across surface firmly. But after a few hundred passed over the Latex surface while there are no scratches, the appearance is dulled a bit for example black latex looks less dark & slightly more grey. But the smoothness doesn't seem to be affected.

 

Why is this?

 

Also I'm trying to find pictures of what the latex surface looks like under a microscope, maybe this will help me understand why exactly latex has soo much friction to the touch. Not sure as on google images, many of the pics look quite different.

 

thanks

 

 

Possibly a matter of size of the scratches. Light reflection is affected by scratches well under 1µm width which won't be noticed as individual valleys. With our fingers, we notice rugosity of very few µm.