The raw silk inside a queen pillowcase costs between US$7 and US$11. That is the August 2026 index price for the fibre, and the finished pillowcase sells for around $77.
The polyester satin lookalike beside it sells for around $11.
Let's cut through the marketing claims. Most of what you pay for a silk item is not fibre at all.
The fibre that is there is still expensive, and the reasons are checkable in grams. A cocoon gives up no more than half a gram of usable thread, and a fifth to a third of that boils away before the cloth is finished.
The step that turns filament into yarn still needs a person to watch it.
A fresh silkworm cocoon weighs 1.5 to 2.5 grams, and only 0.2 to 0.5 grams of that comes off the reel as raw silk. Three separate losses stand between the cocoon and the finished cloth.
- **The shell is a fraction of the cocoon.** The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization puts it at 19 to 25 percent of fresh cocoon weight.
- **Not all of the filament comes off.** Only about 80 percent of the 600 to 1,500 metres of thread inside a good cocoon can be reeled.
- **Degumming boils weight away.** Sericin, the natural coating on the filament, comes off before the cloth is finished, and takes 20 to 30 percent of the weight with it.
The run from cocoon to cloth leaves a queen pillowcase holding 80 to 90 grams of finished silk, from roughly 110 grams of raw silk and roughly 250 to 550 cocoons.
You will see 3,000 cocoons quoted for a single yard of silk. The number is real, but it belongs to a kilogram.
At 0.2 to 0.5 grams each, 3,000 cocoons is 600 grams to 1.5 kilograms of raw silk. Woven into mid-weight 22 momme cloth at 114 cm wide, that is four to eleven yards.
A single yard is a few hundred cocoons.
A silkworm's whole life cycle runs about 45 to 55 days, so supply arrives on a schedule no order can shorten.
Weaving, dyeing, cutting, sewing, freight and margin take the rest, and none of it is specific to silk. That sits under the price of any fabric.
Silk's labour cost survived mechanisation because the filament is too fine to handle any other way. It measures 15 to 20 microns across and breaks under dry handling.
So the thread comes off in water near 80 to 85 degrees Celsius, drawn at 90 to 160 metres a minute, one operator watching three to ten ends at once.
Machines assist that step. They have never removed the person from it.
Farm and mill work together put about 11 man-days of labour into every kilogram of raw silk.
Polyester filament is extruded continuously from a spinneret and cut to length. Silk filament is unwound from one insect's cocoon at a time, eight cocoons to a thread.
The labour is concentrated as well as heavy. Production sits with a handful of producing countries, China first, and the Central Silk Board estimates roughly 8 million people in India's silk sector alone.
A fibre made that way cannot answer a demand spike by running the line faster, so its price never gets competed down the way a synthetic's does.
Silk was once worth its weight in gold in Rome, and the reason was a Chinese monopoly rather than the fibre itself. That monopoly is long gone. The yield is what survived, and it is the part still setting the price.
Momme is a weight, not a quality grade. One momme equals 4.34 grams per square metre, so the number on a product page converts into the silk you are paying for.
| Momme weight | Grams per square metre |
|---|---|
| 19 momme | 82 |
| 22 momme | 95.5 |
| 25 momme | 108 |
A queen pillowcase covers roughly 0.85 to 0.90 square metres across both faces and the flap, or 80 to 90 grams of silk at 22 momme.
Raw silk traded between US$64 and US$95 a kilogram in August 2026 on the Business Analytiq index. Retail prices for finished silk run about ten times that per kilogram of cloth.
The difference is not fibre.
Momme and grade are different levers, and shoppers read them as one. Momme says how much silk is in the cloth; grade says how long and how even the filament is.
Both get sold as premium, and only momme converts into a quantity you can check.
Some of the premium does come back. My own 22 momme case is still smooth at the seams after two years; a 16 momme one thinned at the fold inside a year.
When we quote custom printed silk by the metre, momme is the first line on the order, because it fixes how much fibre is in the cloth.
Compare two silk items by momme weight before you compare their prices. It is the one spec that makes two price tags comparable.
The mistake is reading a price gap as a fibre gap. Two versions of the same item at the same momme weight hold the same quantity of silk whether one is cheap or dear, because the fibre is a small and roughly fixed line in both.
That cuts both ways. The cheaper item is not necessarily cheating you on material, and the expensive one is not necessarily giving you more.
I would take a 22 momme case from a brand I had never heard of over a 16 momme one from a brand I trusted. The weight is checkable. The reputation is not.
