Dbrand wants you to feel less guilty about having your face buried in a screen all day and not getting outside to ‘touch grass.’ The company’s latest collection of skins lets you wrap your gadgets in bright green artificial turf so you can touch grass whenever you want and no matter where you are.
The Touch Grass collection is available now through Dbrand’s website for more than 100 different devices with pricing similar to its other premium skins: $29.95 for smartphones, $49.95 for tablets, and $69.95 for laptops.
Despite the April 1st timing, the Touch Grass collection isn’t a prank, Dbrand CEO Adam Ijaz assures The Verge. “Each year, April 1st rolls around and companies trip over themselves to see who can be the least funny. We, on the other hand, take the opportunity to launch real products. Are they drenched in satire? Yes — but they’re real products you can buy.”
The skins are covered in thousands of tiny polyethylene strands using a technique called electrostatic flocking, Ijaz explains. “Each polyethylene strand is electrically charged, causing it to stand upright and propel directly onto an adhesive-coated surface. In this application, the adhesive coating is applied directly to our classic 3M vinyl skin material.”
To ensure users don’t end up covered in tiny green pieces of artificial grass and to prevent the particles from finding their way inside devices, the strands are “embedded into an adhesive layer that covers roughly 25% of the strand’s height,” Ijaz says. The company subjected the skins to 10,000 abrasive rub cycles during durability testing and found “no issues with strands detaching or ‘bald patches’ forming.”
However, the company found its traditional methods for cutting the skins resulted in the fake grass strands eventually breaking off at the edges. The solution was to switch to laser cutting instead of die-cutting. “The heat from laser cutting effectively cauterizes (melts) the polyethylene strands along the perimeter,” Ijaz says. “This melting creates a sealed edge, bonding together the strands around the border. Ultimately, this was the key to preventing blades of grass around the edge from loosening or shedding over time.”
The biggest issue that Dbrand has found with the Touch Grass skins is that they also tend to function as effective yet unintentional lint catchers, but the company says they can be easily cleaned by gently wiping them.
