Why does colour fade?

When your tent, clothes, or soccer ball colour fades where does the colour go? Do all coloured things fade? Do some colours fade quicker than others? Can you stop something fading? These are the questions we have been looking at.

We are conducting a bit of an experiment. We have selected various materials and are exposing them to UV rays over the next couple of months. We want to see what materials fade and how fast.
We considered the variables such as if the materials are all getting the same amount of light. We have put them on our window sill and discussed if the window glass will affect the results. We found out that most window glass reduces the UVB but not the UVA. It will be interesting to see if there are particular groups of materials that fade and which colours fade the quickest.

A yellow rubber ducky absorbs all colours of the rainbow and turns them to heat, except yellow, it reflects the yellow light back to our eyes. The yellow colour fades when UV breaks down the molecules that reflect the yellow light. So a faded object is absorbing more light and reflecting less.

We watched these two videos to help us understand colour fading.


The colour red fades more than any other colour, especially blue. This can be seen in the below photo.

Most fading of colour happens with dyed products. My question is will the material of a red tent break down quicker than a blue tent or is it just the red dye that will fade quicker? Will the strength of the material break down at the same speed, regardless of the colour?