Sally Fox invented the first species of environmentally friendly colored cotton that could be spun into thread on a machine. She studied biology, but was always interested in textile. She was working as a pollinator for a cotton breeder when she came across some cotton seeds that produced brown cotton. Fox crossbred those seeds and eventually naturally produced brown and green cotton in 1988. Colored cotton wasn’t a new thing, because it did grow naturally, but could only be spun by hand. Fox was looking for a way to produce cotton with larger fiber that would allow the cotton to be spun into a thread by a machine. This discovery was important because bleaching and dyeing normal cotton causes a lot of pollution.